Mechanical Integrity as An Element of Process Safety Management

In simple terms, Process Safety Management (PSM) can be seen as a mandated Quality program intended to: a) Make sure; b) the important things; c) are done right

To prevent catastrophic events leading to loss of life, significant property loss, or damage to the environment. The mechanical integrity PSM element might be defined as the program that assures the system integrity to contain hazardous substances, and that is maintained throughout the life of the facility. Although this is a definition that is not shared by everybody (there is the idea to include a more general term, as reliability), the concept so defined forces us to focus in all the failures modes of the system (equipment, human, system) that could affect the safety of people and communities, the environment and the integrity of a facility. Although it is not easy or humble to say, as a company, ?We will not make, handle, use, sell, transport, or dispose of a product unless we can do so safely and in an environmentally sound manner? it conveys a leadership message to all the organization that everybody must share. This implies that essentially all the failure modes are known, and a specific strategy to handle each of them should exist since the early design concept until a facility is dismantled. That is the scope of a Mechanical Integrity system should have. The main load of this safety effort relies on the design of the facility and is spelled out in the specifications of the equipment and the effort spent in the assurance of the quality of the equipment until its commissioning. Once built, operations and maintenance needs to understand the intent of the design and maintain this specification for the life time of the facility.

In USA, since the PSM and the Mechanical Integrity aspects were regulated, about three or four round audits have been done in the majority of the facilities. In Latin-American countries not all of them have regulated PSM or MI in a comprehensive regulation. An important aspect to maintain the mechanical integrity of the facility relies on the regular audits that should be performed to the system. Audit protocols are usually based on statements to be assessed by an audit team. However a comprehensive management system, based in mechanical integrity sub - elements as should be applied to each PSM critical equipment would lead to assess the quality of the relationship among elements, trying to build a thorough protection layer.

Such audits, made to several facilities in USA and Latin-American would reveal important areas of opportunity. The main purpose of this paper is to reduce to the greatest extend the consecutio temporum steps that comprises the PSM MI element and provide management ideas on how to improve a MI program as applies to a Latin-American industry that handles hazardous materials based on the experience gained in those audits.