(78e) Operating Companies' Roles in Preventing Contractors from Being Affected by Process Chemicals during Plant Shutdowns

Chemical accidents at process plants are not only possible during normal operation, but also during shutdown periods. Shutdowns need to be addressed by process safety studies as ? in the vast majority of cases ? hazardous process chemicals remain present at the installation in storage tanks, warehouses, silos and pipelines even when the production process is not running. As the number of persons present during a shutdown may be much higher that otherwise ? some Finnish companies report from 100 to 500 external maintenance workers at the plant during the busiest periods of a shutdown ? the consequences of a chemical leak might be severe.

A Finnish study has been carried out in order to investigate how five Finnish operating companies ? all covered by the EU's Major Hazards Directive ? are dealing with process and chemical safety during maintenance shutdowns of their installations. Systematic procedures to prevent contract workers from causing accidents are since many years in place in the Finnish process industry. It seems, however, that the way the safety of the contractors is secured by the operating companies themselves is not as systematic. The study revealed, for instance, that there typically are no systematic management procedures in place to ensure that the process plant's own personnel has the knowledge and skills needed to make the plant safe before cleaning, maintenance and construction work commence. Neither, it seems, are the plants' rescue teams and the local fire brigades prepared to handle hazardous situations involving tens or even hundreds of contractor workers. A presentation pointing out these shortcomings was given at the International Symposium on Process and Explosion Protection in Nuremburg, Germany, in September 2008.

Continuing from the above mentioned presentation, the proposed paper will focus on ways that the operating companies' can minimise the risk of exposing contract workers to process chemicals. The research team has identified, amongst others, the following possibilities for improvements:

? More time and resources need to be allocated for risk assessments prior to a major shutdown;

? The plant's EHS and rescue teams should take a bigger role in the planning process;

? By better scheduling of the maintenance work, bottlenecks in connection to the writing of work permits may be removed, thus allowing for a proper check of the safety of the workplace before maintenance work commences ? much of the work need not to be started the first morning!;

? A management procedure should be put in place to make sure that the operators (and indeed the foremen) are fully aware of how to make the plant ? or a part of it ? safe prior to maintenance work and how to maintain this level of safety throughout the entire shutdown and start-up periods;

? The local fire brigade and the police should be informed about the shutdown and the associated risks. The fire brigade and the police should have an external rescue plan in place also for this exceptional situation.

In addition to discussing the above issues in detail in the proposed paper, a new hazard analysis method developed for identifying potential chemical hazards during shutdowns will also be presented (at the time of the Symposium this method will be publicly available in Finnish on VTT's website, but the English version will be presented for the first time in Tampa).