Process Safety Beacon

Sponsored and produced by CCPS, the Process Safety Beacon is a resource aimed at delivering process safety messages to plant operators and other manufacturing personnel. The monthly one-page newsletter covers the breadth of process safety topics. Each issue presents a real-life accident, and describes the lessons learned and practical means to prevent a similar accident in your plant. With an estimated distribution of a million readers, the Beacon is CCPS’ most widely read publication.

Read a sample edition of the Process Safety Beacon

The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) recognizes the outstanding efforts of the CCPS Beacon Team (Beacon committee and translators).  The beacon team works diligently every month in promoting improved process safety performance throughout the world so that front-line workers can learn about process safety. Since November 2001 the Process Safety Beacon has been a shining light providing information to the process industries worldwide. The Beacon is written for front-line plant workers – operators, technicians, shift supervisors, and maintenance workers. It is also widely used by Engineers, managers, executives, government regulators, and academia. 

Starting from humble beginnings as a file sent to a small group of people, the Beacon is now directly distributed to nearly 40,000 subscribers and is typically available in about 40 languages. This is possible because of our dedicated beacon team members, who donate their time, energy, and expertise to bring this information to all. On behalf of CCPS, AIChE, and all beacon readers we thank the beacon committee and translators for their contribution in spreading the Beacon message. The beacon team can never know the impact they have but be assured that it is highly likely that somebody, somewhere did something different because he or she read the monthly Beacon, and an accident that would have happened did not. We do not know about accidents that don’t happen because of the beacon team’s efforts, but be assured that they are saving lives!

Help us bring a process safety message to an even larger world wide audience each month by encouraging your colleagues to register. Registration is quick and easy. After you register, the Beacon will be sent to you FREE each month via email. During the registration process, you may choose to receive the Beacon in as many of the available languages as you wish.

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Subscribe to the Beacon

The aim of the Beacon is to provide a regular message for manufacturing personnel. This is a monthly offering, but is dependent upon the input of users like you. By sharing these messages, based upon actual incidents from companies, the content is more meaningful to operation personnel. The Beacon format is a one-page flyer with an eye-catching title, picture, or graphic depicting an incident, text explaining the incident, the impact, how the error was corrected, and the lessons learned. While you may not have the same equipment of chemicals in your sites, the lessons learned are meant to be universal. Also, a single incident may have several causes and therefore more lessons than what can be highlighted in a single Beacon.

To keep this process safety tool operating, we need a supply of "raw material". We need a copy of incidents from your companies that have process safety lesson(s). (Please no personnel safety incidents that do not have a process safety connection.) Do not worry about the format. All we need is a picture (if possible) that depicts the incident, and 2-3 paragraphs explaining briefly what happened, why it happened, how it was corrected, and what were the lessons learned. Any reference to your company will be removed from the message. Submit the package to CCPS electronically (ccps_beacon@aiche.org ) and a CCPS staff person will do the final formatting and editing. If you like, you can review the final draft of the Beacon to make sure it is correct before CCPS sends it out to the users.

All translations are done by volunteers who give their time and talent to supporting this publication. Our thanks go out to these volunteers. We usually publish the Beacon in the following languages:

• Afrikaans
• Arabic
• Catalan
• Chinese(Simplified and Traditional) 
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Filipino
• French and Canadian French
• German
• Greek
• Gujarati
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Malay
• Marathi
• Mongolian
• Persian (Farsi)
• Polish
• Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Telugu
• Thai
• Turkish
• Vietnamese

Process Safety Beacons Archive includes all Beacons and can be searched and filtered. The full archive is available to everyone to download and share. 

Go to the Beacon Archive