Manage Risks

Catastrophic incident root causes often may be correlated with power outages. An unanticipated power outage may be an initiating event that leads to a process upset or even an emergency shutdown of a process unit. If the planning and implementation of the emergency shutdown are managed incorrectly...

Process Safety Management Plus or Minus 20 Years - What I Wish I'd Known 20 Years Ago and What We Can't Wait Another 20 Years to Learn Abstract of proposed presentation to the Global Congress on Process Safety: Houston - April, 2012 Presenter: Alan C. (Al) Brackey, Senior Manager PSM Audit - Valero...

Located at Dow's Freeport, Texas site, the B-4000 Multifunctional Pilot Plant has safely supported diverse research initiatives related to the development of chemical processes and evaluation of catalysts, raw materials and products since 2000. The facility provides the necessary infrastructure...

This investigation by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) provides unique lessons in process safety. Three incidents occurred over a 33-hour period at the DuPont plant in Belle, WV. The most serious incident occurred on January 23, 2010, when a release of highly...

Learning from experience is one of the four pillars of Risk-Based Process Safety. Incidents that occur at one facility often provide opportunities to strengthen management systems at other facilities. Sharing the technical lessons learned from incidents is morally right and vital to improving...

To perform LOPA's, fault tree analysis, SIL verifications and other quantitative likelihood analyses requires data. As much as everyone wants data, it always seems to be elusive or lacking in quality. This paper explores various issues that the authors have experienced when dealing with end user...

While Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) can be an essential element of process facility design to minimize the potential for process incidents, in some cases they can also be over-applied in the design phases of capital projects where the Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) associated with the SIS...

A truck driver loading a tanker was fatally injured in a flash fire. The accident occurred at the loading rack of a petroleum refinery. The truck driver was on top of the tank trailer loading a liquid petroleum byproduct material similar to asphalt through an open hatch on the trailer. The material...

On the Catastrophic Explosion of the AZF plant in Toulouse (September 21, 2001) Georges Guiochon and Laurent Jacob Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996-1600, USA During the morning of September 21, 2001, a warehouse containing ca. 300 metric tons of production...