Buncefield progress fuels debate

With the process industries still striving to address all the safety issues raised by the investigation into the Buncefield accident, opinion is divided on the amount of progress made since the accident at the fuel-storage facility on 11 Dec 2005.

There has been a significant improvement in the standard of overfill protection and secondary and tertiary containment at fuel terminals since the Buncefield disaster, according to the UK Petroleum Industry Association (See full PE article).

However, according to Andrew Fowler, principal consultant at HFL Risk Services, many man-years of effort have produced little more than a requirement that storage units are fitted with a SIL overfill device.

As he points out, the Competent Authority has raised the standard, but even SIL devices can fail to work. This is more likely if it is not reinstalled properly after testing or maintenance - the reason why the safety device fitted originally failed to do its job.

Process facilities in the UK generally have had good safety records, but John Joosten, product manager radar and safety at Honeywell Enraf, believes the safety focus at Buncefield was inadequate.

Now there is huge focus on safety in the UK, he says. And across Europe the incident is used as an example of the possible results when safety equipment and systems, maintenance and operating practices, and management procedures are either missing or are inadequate.

In contrast, a much different philosophy still exists in the US. There, the API2350 overfill protection standard still does not require an automatic safety system that is independent from the general process control system, as is now recommended in Europe.

Hence, said Joosten, the US market still relies on operators for overfill protection and, as we have seen, “humans are not the best sources to guarantee a safe operating plant”.

Fowler says the conclusions drawn from Buncefield have been a good excuse for authorities to start “gold-plating their safety requirements - and they have acted cleverly by involving industry in the changes”.

Overall, he believes, this has led to the risk-based approach to safety being downgraded in favour of compliance with standards.

Many changes to working practices have been made over the last five years and others in the programme agreed with industry are continuing. Nevertheless, Ian Travers, head of chemical industries strategy unit, HSE, says that, while it is timely to remind operators of all major hazard installations to maintain high standards of process safety, it is also timely to remind them of the need for process safety leadership at all times.