How to Maintain a Process Safety System

Related Vendors

DÜPERTHAL Sicherheitstechnik GmbH & Co. KG

TURCK GmbH

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Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL)

More than Cuts and Bruises: Safety Measures Beyond the Shop Level

Till recent times, for most organizations safety management meant focusing on shop floor accidents and injuries like cuts, bruises and fractures. Incident protection and recovery was assigned to a safety committee represented by shop floor personnel. Such incidents are generally of low consequence yet high frequency. Preventive measures, for the most part, are limited to the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Although these rules presented a good foundation to build a basic system for workplace and process safety, effective safety management was kindled only after the Bhopal incident. Safety norms underwent a pivotal transformation to make line management more responsible with added focus on behavioral issues along with systems and procedures looking beyond regulations.

Designing a Safety System for the Petrochemical Industry

The Chemical Process Safety system (CPSM) emphasizes that prevention is always better than curing — a fact that is especially true for the petrochemical industry, a part of the downstream sector of the oil and gas industry. This branch typically deals with chemicals like hydrocarbons and other petroleum derivatives. As these substances are often toxic, flammable, explosive or reactive in nature, they have to be handled with extreme care. The CPSM defines risk as the likelihood of the damage by an incident that escalated from a hazard during an activity.

The hazards associated with any process typically result from either the fundamental chemical characteristics of the process materials (e.g. toxicity, flammability, reactivity, exclusivity), the physical conditions under which the materials are handled (e.g. temperature and pressure), the characteristics of the process equipment, or a combination of these factors.

Sadly, since all activities involve hazards, it’s beyond human control to eliminate all of them. However, risks can be controlled and the hazard can be managed to avoid catastrophic outcomes. For example, generally, a manufacturing industry encompasses different activities such as transportation and storage of chemicals, processing, removal of unwanted components and pollutants, packaging and storage of the final product, and its transportation to consumers.

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