(83e) The Failure to Communicate: Risk Assessment Challenges Outside the Chemical Process Industries

The chemical process industries (CPI) have developed sophisticated methods to identify hazards, identify their avenues for escape, develop methods to block their escape and assess the associated risk. These methods were spawned by notable world-scale excursions resulting in substantial loss of life, capital and business. These methods assume a level of personnel sophistication. In fact, they have spawned an educational system that prepares analysts to look beyond intended performance rooted in technical fundamentals.

World-scale methods applied to neighborhood industries and economics result in a disconnect between the assumed and actual outlook, education and sophistication. This disconnect challenges the direct implementation of the world-scale methods. We only have look at Imperial Sugar to recognize that the methods of the CPI have not gone beyond that industry. Hazards go unrecognized, near-hits are not investigated, risk is not evaluated and world-scale events are the result.

Bringing CPI methods to a perspective and engineering-fundamentals challenged culture results in failure to identify properly hazards and mitigate risks. The initiative spawned by CSB to force OSHA to regulate an industry far outside the traditional PSM/PHA focus will be problematic until methods are tailored to those industries to educate them in fundamentals foundation, hazard perspective and excursion prediction.

This paper presents our experiences over the last five years to evaluate risk in an industry far outside the traditional CPI. Specific examples in communication breakdown will be presented to form the foundation for proposed evolutionary procedure, discussed in the paper, which not only educates the plant personnel but also identifies hazards, evaluates consequence and mitigates risk.