Making Everyone a Barrier Guardian

Process safety layers of protection, often referred to as barriers, are typically comprised of plant hardware, procedures, and people. In a typical plant, depending upon your job role, people may be directly involved with the performance of several barriers, and indirectly involved with many more. This paper will describe an approach for making people better Barrier Guardians - that is, having the risk situational awareness and using competency and tools to help ensure that process safety barriers are ready to work f called upon by an authentic demand.

This paper will describe the results of evaluations from several refineries to describe the (1) barriers applicable to four different plant job roles, (2) the job activities within each job role that affect barrier dependability, and (3) effectiveness metrics that each person can monitor to help ensure barrier readiness. The four job roles come from evaluations 12 typical roles in each refinery; the following four will be presented: field operator; maintenance technician, area supervisor, and process safety engineer.

The results of these studies will provide a Barrier Watchfulness activity scorecard that people within each job role can use for their plant area to be better Barrier Guardians.