Accidents will happen
8 Feb 2010
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.
