(156c) Dam(n) Safety Lessons: Risk Based Process Safety Principles Applied to a 2020 Dam Failure

On May 19, 2020, over 10,000 Mid-Michigan residents were ordered to evacuate their homes during a pandemic because of two impending dam failures. Swift emergency response coordination enabled people to evacuate in time and no one lost their lives. Unfortunately, nearly every business in the village of Sanford, MI was destroyed; more than 2,000 homes were damaged or condemned; roadways and bridges were swept away; and two lakes disappeared within hours, resulting in permanent disruption to the local ecosystem.

This disaster could have been avoided: The dam system had experienced three near misses in its 95-year history prior to failure, and deficiencies were discussed between the dam owners, government, and community for over 11 years. In addition, dam operators financially struggled in a significantly changing business model for small-scale hydroelectric production. Interestingly, this experience is not unique to dams and infrastructure; it can be applied to companies that manufacture, use, transport and store hazardous materials.

Process safety is the study of applying management systems to prevent rare, catastrophic events such as fires, explosions and toxic releases. The probability of these catastrophic events is rare, but when they do occur, they can destroy the lives of workers, the community, and the reputation of the organization.

We can apply the elements of Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) to the 2020 Mid-Michigan dam failures as a case study to demonstrate where systems failed and understand how these risks could be averted in the future. This case study will show the impact of using RBPS to prevent rare, catastrophic events at many types of manufacturing and warehousing facilities.

This paper will walk through the four pillars of the CCPS Risk Based Process Safety Model, using publicly available data from the 2020 Michigan dam failures as a case study to illustrate how impactful the RBPS pillars can be for many non-chemical industry segments:

1. Commit to Process Safety, including the importance of leaders giving authority to competent personnel to escalate concerns so that concerns can be identified and resolved swiftly, and to perform due-diligence audits prior to acquiring a high-risk operation.
2. Understand Hazards and Risks, including the success story where Emergency Responders used knowledge of the projected worst-case flood analysis to quickly evacuate at-risk member of the community.
3. Manage Risk, including maintaining equipment to meet Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practices (RAGAGEP), and to swiftly resolve deficiencies once discovered.
4. Learn from Experience, including ensuring someone with authority reviews facility incident data; Industry incident data; and third-party audit inspection results to shift resources to fix a systems issue before disaster strikes.