Why Tanks and Pressure Vessels Protection Fails or Are Understimated and Still Are the Cause of Events on 2022?

Why tanks and pressure vessels protection fails or are underestimated and still are the cause of events on 2022?

Identifying the hazards and understanding the risks involved in design, construction, operating and maintaining tanks and pressure vessels protections in industry are key actions to keep and improve process safety on a wide sort of industry segment.

Since a long time in historical timeline of industry events, there are cases involving tanks and pressure vessels. By definition a tank and/or a pressure vessel contains hazardous materials and bring a dangerous composition that could cause a catastrophic event. Add to this point the amount of inventory that can multiply the risk and the consequences. All this together by itself is dangerous enough to inspire care. When we refer to pressures vessels there are additional and important conditions to increase the risk and potentializes the effects. Even after considering this items it is not possible to forget human factor. Yes, the man is the main actor of every enterprise. The sense of entrepreneurship sometimes makes the will to be more profitable, and the human creativity can be the center to undesired events that leads to tragedy.

Through this paper it will be possible to reflect about hazards, risks, causes and consequences of underestimated efforts to protect assets, people and environmental. When event deployment is included in this analysis it is possible to clear the need to identify safeguards that can detect, decide and act in order to reduce the exposure to risk. Every process safety event is avoidable. It is a question to apply sistematic routine focused on understanding the specific hazard, the conditions that brings the likelihood to an acceptable level, and by the way, to an acceptable risk category.

It will be discussed some events that reveal what went wrong even at this time of history with access to all kind of information, all kind of technical resources and all kind of lessons learned that maybe were not well learned at all.

Why the organizations keep making the same mistakes? What is so difficult to learn with previous experience? What is the cause that lead people to allow this happen, maybe the temptation to take shortcuts instead of follow the technical knowledge? Therefore reality charge a so high price for so simple misunderstandings.

What should we do to avoid these unwanted material events to happen again? And again and again...

Applying process safety concepts described in RBPS elements is a successful decision and, at most of times, brings consistent results.