Reflecting on a Friday Night in the ER
2024 June Jerry Forest This article discusses the chemical incident and resulting trip to the emergency room (ER) that set one engineer’s career in motion toward process safety. ...
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Process Safety Beacon: Does the Piping Meet the Specification?
2024 May ▲ A cast iron Y-strainer failed during operation and released flammable isobutylene. See the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) Report No. 2019-02-I-TX for more detail. A vapor cloud explosion and fire led to one fatality a ... -
The Effect of Human Factors and Leadership on Safety
2024 May Mark Breese Sections Background Leadership drives safety excellence Types of leadership and their effects Ensuring that safety becomes the key topic of conversation Implementing safe conditions Tools to support safe working Challenging the status ... -
Process Safety Beacon: Get Out and Stay Out
2024 April ▲ Employees evacuated from a food processing facility after a fatal nitrogen release. Image credit: Scott Rogers/The Times via Associated Press. On Jan. 28, 2021, liquid nitrogen overflowed from an immersion freezer located inside a food proces ... -
Effective Procedures and Process Safety
2024 March Rob Fisher Clearly written and intuitive procedures are a crucial component of safe operations. Avoid vague terms and systemic error drivers in procedures to improve field performance and process safety. Many organizations that deal with proces ... -
The Dogma of Process Safety
2024 March Sean J. Dee, P.E. Christopher S. Buehler, P.E. Russell A. Ogle Nicholas Reding Navid Zanganeh When an incident occurs, a process safety management (PSM) program is often scrutinized. PSM program failures can have significant contractual and leg ... -
New Products: March 2024
2024 March Fluids and Solids Handling Diaphragm Seal Is Suitable for Sanitary Applications Diaphragm seals are used to separate media in a vessel from a pressure sensor, as the flexible diaphragm allows for accurate measurement without media contact with ... -
Process Safety Beacon: Process Upsets Require Focus
2024 March Consider a process that suddenly starts operating erratically and shuts down. It could be an instrument failure, but what really caused the upset? During an unplanned shutdown, the focus may be on restarting the operation. Pressures to return t ... -
Supporting LOPA with Fault Tree Analysis
2024 February Edward M. Marszal John Applegate Risk management tools like layers of protection analysis (LOPA) can oversimplify risk analyses. More advanced tools such as fault tree analysis can expand these simple studies and make them more accurate. Lay ... -
Process Safety Beacon: Vacuum Can Put a Dent in Your Process
2024 February ▲ A railcar collapsed after a steam-out process because it was not properly vented. A process containing flammable materials was operating under vacuum. Suddenly, the vent line collapsed. Equipment can collapse when the internal pressure cre ...