Improving Process Safety Performance

The path to process safety success has a minefield of misunderstanding, missed evaluation, missed opportunities and unlearned experiences. Process safety has four vital aspects: identification, evaluation, management and advancement. These are broken down further in various regulations and technical guidelines. However fine of dissection, engineering fundamentals must be understood; the escape of hazards must be seen and characterized following the fundamental understanding; the impact must be estimated; the pathways mitigated and managed; and, the documentation to facilitate learning and advancement must be successfully accomplished. This is all done under and over-arching safety culture which demands nourishment. The literature is replete with events resulting from poorly understood fundamentals, incomplete analyses, poor estimation, weak management and poor documentation. Improving process safety performance requires intellectual, financial and time resources, the demands upon which may limit implementation success and continuation. This session solicits papers drawing upon experience where process safety performance was compromised and methods were developed to improve it, where process safety performance has evolved as the challenges to an organization became greater or smaller and where process safety performance methods were tested, found wanting in results or resources and improved. Papers which emphasize recommended practices are strongly encouraged.