(54at) Learning from Experience: Preventive Potential of Near Miss Deep Understanding and Technical Analysis - Experiences and Concepts from Braskem

Process Safety Management (PSM) is a crucial sustainability feature for industrial companies who deal with dangerous products, especially considering the actual scenario of global market, high competitiveness, strong safety requirement and high world demand consume. Reinforced by the perception that the frequency of major process incidents in the last years in world is still higher than expected, it is necessary the Process Safety preventive initiatives that could make the PSM of a chemical and petrochemical organization a real efficient program. The focus on the management of effective main criticalities is one key aspect of a robust PSM program, reflected on the sustainable decrease of incidents occurrence.

Considering that major incidents normally occurs due to trivial failures in process safety management, the consolidation of a strong process safety preventive culture remains a challenge. For this culture to take hold, development systemic management practices underpinned by preventive measures are necessary. In this context, the development of practices based on the management pillar of ’Learn from Experience’ is an important alternative, which the preventive approach is because of focus on leading metrics, where the deep understanding of minor process safety occurrences can be a strong contribution to a robust PSM program. The treatment of data from near misses occurrences, the critical analysis of their results and the comprehensive analysis internally in the organization are part of the strategy of preventive approach by using lessons from near miss events. In case of global companies as Braskem, that has different, business, site and facilities, this strategy has the potential to be protagonist in the way of a sustainable process safety preventive culture.

Braskem follows the metrics of API RP 754 (2^nd edition), that classifies process safety events in four levels: Tier 1 (LOPC of greater consequence), Tier 2 (LOPC of lesser consequence), Tier 3 (challenges to safety systems) and Tier 4 (systemic or behavior deviation). The first two categories represent lagging indicators and the last two represent leading indicators, i.e. when the number of occurrences is higher, but the consequence impact is lower. Thereby, Tier 3 events metric, also called ‘near miss’, indicates the amount of occurrences that should be considered relevant process incidents, but not transformed in an incident, in most of cases, due to safety barriers performance. This Tier 3 metric is a precious source of information, which can indicate various types of failure tendencies and dominant causes, allowing preventive measures and making Tier 3 really “gifts from Gods”.

Under a preventive perspective, this paper try to present concepts, initiatives and models developed by Braskem related to critical and statistics analysis of Tier 3 occurrences, with the main objective of showing how effective it is to generate preventive measures in order to avoid major process safety incidents (Tier 1 and 2).