Accidents will happen
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The fatal accident at the Kleen Energy power plant on 7 Feb in Middletown, Connecticut, is just the latest in a continuum of serious accidents that have long blighted the process industries.
Like other high profile industrial accidents such as Texas City, Buncefield, Toulouse, Seveso, and Flixborough, the US incident is likely to lead to further recommendations and standards from the US Chemical Safety Board, and quite possibly other industrial safety bodies around the world.
The safety agencies put a lot of excellent work into sifting through the fallout to identify all the myriad of factors behind each accident. However, some in the process sector argue that amid all this painstaking attention to detail, we are often ‘not seeing the woods for the trees’ when it come to addressing industrial safety issues.
As Dr Julian Hought, managing director of process safety company, HFL Risk Services, puts it: “Amid all the renewed regulatory focus on process safety and asset integrity within the hazardous chemicals industries; the question remains “do we have to keep having accidents to give companies a wake-up call?
Highlighting, what he terms “the dangers of corporate memory loss’, Hought said: “History tends to repeat itself, despite due diligence to safe operation immediately following major accidents.”
Dr Hought will address these issues in an article for a coming issue of Process Engineering, which will also look at the potential impact on safety of: Changes in personnel without suitable knowledge transfer; changes in the use of plant and equipment; inadequate process safety management systems; poor asset integrity; the pressures on ageing plant can lead to.
In the meantime, however, it would be interesting to learn readers’ views on whether there is scope for new thinking towards getting more companies to embrace best practice and standards for ensuring the safety of process facilities.
Readers' comments (7)
Robin Brooks | 12 Feb 2010 1:36 pm
The use of alarm limits related to an Operating Envelope and thus aware of many variables and their interactions could have warned of individual measurement abnormalities and process excursions sooner than the alarms in use today. This might have been a preventative factor in some situations.
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Leigh Gubb | 12 Feb 2010 1:48 pm
Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, even if a plant is designed safely very often the maintenance of equipment is not always up to scratch and accidents happen in spite of the plant being designed correctly.
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Anonymous | 12 Feb 2010 2:17 pm
Dr Hought is right on the money. 'Corporate Memory loss' is a curious, yet prevailent term - so prevailent that part of the problem must surely lie in systemic failures. How many chemical process companies have an IT-based knowledge base which, if designed and utilised correctly might contribute significantly to either improved levels of safety or wider consideration of all current and past hazards in relation to a process or work being done upon it. I am not proscribing that we place all our faith in such systems but they do act, if programmed with sufficient 'intelligence' as great aide-memoirs and are easily capable of preventing 'corporate memory loss'
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S Barker | 12 Feb 2010 3:10 pm
It's not that different to the banking crisis.
As long as the CEOs get to keep their share options and golden parachutes they won't put safety first. Sarbanes Oxley, FCPA etc scares the cr**p out of CEO's & CFO's and they take it seriously. The industrial and financial regulators need to look and learn.
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T. Warner | 12 Feb 2010 4:34 pm
Production, production, production. Lets do the maintenance tomorrow when maybe we are not so busy.
H&S? Just a paper excercise.
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Gus Bishop | 15 Feb 2010 10:57 am
Part of the problem is fear: fear that the management will not listen to the view of a "junior" operative; fear of retribution against a whistle blower, eg. blocked promotion or worse; fear of meddling by over-zealous safety officers, hampering productivity. To overcome this, each company should be required to keep a safety log - not just incidents but positive suggestions, which would be available for regular inspection by HSE or other independent body. A shortage of comments in this log may indicate a repressive or apathetic regime, or maybe exemplary conduct. However it would encourage practical safety dialogue across the workforce, with guaranteed attention to important issues.
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Brian Aherne | 11 Mar 2010 12:11 pm
The shame about such accidents in the process industry is that there’s rarely if ever just one single cause. The findings of any investigation will undoubtedly show that while there may apparently have been one trigger, that only existed because of a failure in the system as a whole, because this is invariably a complex issue. The only truly preventative measures are ones that take on the organisation as whole and which combine compliance, behavioural safety and cultural change.
It’s complex, sure, but that is what’s necessary. Compliance-based standards such as EN61511, however are taking that complexity into account and can help a great deal.
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