A Silent Saviour from Process Incident

Industry has regularly seen serious disaster impacting society, property and environment. Detail analysis of such investigation shows systemic failures and many of them are due to inadequate inputs from Process Safety Information (PSI). In the recent reviews of Process Safety Management (PSM) programs by OSHA (“the agency”), it has been confirmed that, out of the two most cited elements in agency audits, one of them is Process Safety Information (PSI). Reality check across the industry reinforces the fact that PSI is frequently overlooked and its role as saviour is normally ignored.

Inadequacy of PSI results due to multiple reasons like, technology suppliers not sharing complete information, uncontrolled changes in plant without modification of PSI, changes in plant ownership & loss of information during transition, poor control over PSI documents and so on. For old technology plants, issue is more complex since regulations get changed over the period. On the other hand, focus of the top leadership is more on the completion of risk assessment without checking the adequacy and / or support for comprehensiveness of PSI.

PSI contributes to all elements of process safety management system (PSM). In the absence of inadequate PSI, other elements of PSM continue to remain erroneous. In this situation, huge efforts in risk recognition, operating procedures development and training will continue to be inappropriate. Such gaps in systems will cause failure of one or other component of management system and especially PSM, resulting into incident.

This paper focuses on the identification of causes of inadequacy of PSI and its impact on other PSM elements. Paper suggests various approaches on how to make PSI sufficiently adequate so as to develop a strong PSM system capable of adequately maintaining PSI over the life-cycle of Plant and mechanism to ensure proper understanding of PSI by leadership and its role as silent savour.

KEYWORDS

Process Safety Information, Risk Recognition, Process Safety Management, PSI, PSM