Process Safety Beacon | AIChE

What is the Beacon

Sponsored and produced by CCPS, the Process Safety Beacon is a resource aimed at delivering process safety messages to plant operators and other manufacturing personnel. The monthly one-page newsletter covers the breadth of process safety topics. Each issue presents a real-life accident, and describes the lessons learned and practical means to prevent a similar accident in your plant. With an estimated distribution of a million readers, the Beacon is CCPS’ most widely read publication.

Read a sample edition of the Process Safety Beacon

Thank You and Acknowledgement

The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) recognizes the outstanding efforts of the CCPS Beacon Team (Beacon committee and translators).  The beacon team works diligently every month in promoting improved process safety performance throughout the world so that front-line workers can learn about process safety. Since November 2001 the Process Safety Beacon has been a shining light providing information to the process industries worldwide. The Beacon is written for front-line plant workers – operators, technicians, shift supervisors, and maintenance workers. It is also widely used by Engineers, managers, executives, government regulators, and academia. 

Starting from humble beginnings as a file sent to a small group of people, the Beacon is now directly distributed to nearly 40,000 subscribers and is typically available in about 40 languages. This is possible because of our dedicated beacon team members, who donate their time, energy, and expertise to bring this information to all. On behalf of CCPS, AIChE, and all beacon readers we thank the beacon committee and translators for their contribution in spreading the Beacon message. The beacon team can never know the impact they have but be assured that it is highly likely that somebody, somewhere did something different because he or she read the monthly Beacon, and an accident that would have happened did not. We do not know about accidents that don’t happen because of the beacon team’s efforts, but be assured that they are saving lives!

Subscribe to the Beacon

Help us bring a process safety message to an even larger world wide audience each month by encouraging your colleagues to register. Registration is quick and easy. After you register, the Beacon will be sent to you FREE each month via email. During the registration process, you may choose to receive the Beacon in as many of the available languages as you wish.

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Subscribe to the Beacon

How is the Beacon used?

The aim of the Beacon is to provide a regular message for manufacturing personnel. This is a monthly offering, but is dependent upon the input of users like you. By sharing these messages, based upon actual incidents from companies, the content is more meaningful to operation personnel. The Beacon format is a one-page flyer with an eye-catching title, picture, or graphic depicting an incident, text explaining the incident, the impact, how the error was corrected, and the lessons learned. While you may not have the same equipment of chemicals in your sites, the lessons learned are meant to be universal. Also, a single incident may have several causes and therefore more lessons than what can be highlighted in a single Beacon.

How to submit a Beacon idea

To keep this process safety tool operating, we need a supply of "raw material". We need a copy of incidents from your companies that have process safety lesson(s). (Please no personnel safety incidents that do not have a process safety connection.) Do not worry about the format. All we need is a picture (if possible) that depicts the incident, and 2-3 paragraphs explaining briefly what happened, why it happened, how it was corrected, and what were the lessons learned. Any reference to your company will be removed from the message. Submit the package to CCPS electronically (ccps_beacon@aiche.org ) and a CCPS staff person will do the final formatting and editing. If you like, you can review the final draft of the Beacon to make sure it is correct before CCPS sends it out to the users.

What languages is Beacon translated in?

All translations are done by volunteers who give their time and talent to supporting this publication. Our thanks go out to these volunteers. We usually publish the Beacon in the following languages:

  • Afrikaans
  • Arabic
  • Catalan
  • Chinese(Simplified and Traditional) 
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Filipino
  • French and Canadian French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Gujarati
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Malay
  • Marathi
  • Mongolian
  • Persian (Farsi)
  • Polish
  • Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Telugu
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese

How to access Beacon archives

Process Safety Beacons Archive includes all Beacons and can be searched and filtered. The full archive is available to everyone to download and share. 

Go to the Beacon Archive

Registered but not getting the Beacon?

Each month several people who registered to get the Beacon are not receiving it. Here is a list of problems that can cause delivery failures:

  • Your e-mail address changed and you did not re-register with your new contact information.
  • Your system is configured to reject e-mails from my ISP (att.net) and/or it is classifying transmittals from my ISP as Spam.
  • Your system is configured to reject or classify as Spam e-mails that have a large number of recipients (mass mailings).
  • Your system is configured to remove attachments from my ISP or to convert the attached .pdf files to .dat files.
  • Your mail box is full.
  • How to Ensure You Receive CCPS Bulk Email Communications

After three months of rejections, your e-mail is removed from our system. If you have receipt problems, please check into these possible causes. I cannot correct them for you. You will have to make the necessary corrections. Feel free to let me know about any other receipt problems that you have.

Contact Beacon

If you're interested in the Beacon, contact Jing Chen, Senior Engineering Specialist, CCPS ccps_beacon@aiche.org

 For permissions information, click here.

Book of Beacons

The Book of Beacons is an ongoing project intended to use the accumulated information contained in the Process Safety Beacons as the basis to expand the applications of the available knowledge. It provides a deeper analysis of each Beacon topic and provides additional information to be considered, not only as crew meeting topics for the frontline workers but to encourage learning and discussion among other groups of employees and contractors. It is available in a flipbook format, which is a searchable database that provides material for the creation of focused messages for an audience or a circumstance.