OSHA's National Emphasis Program (NEP) has encouraged facilities to start taking a closer look at their Process Hazards Analysis (PHA) process and plant hazards. Projects to correct hazards are both being planned and underway at a higher rate than in the past. At the same time, resources (both capital and people) are tighter than they have been in recent history. These forces combine to make a potential Process Safety Managment (PSM) incident more likely. An accident with serious consequences could cause substantial business interruption and threaten an entire company's ability to survive in a tight economy. With these concerns in mind, a methodical, open-minded approach is needed to investigate unexpected equipment performance before a safety incident occurs. Case study No injuries or fatalities resulted from a spent caustic explosion at a major Midwestern USA refinery on August 14, 2007. The explosion occurred after operators initiated a routine manual procedure to safely vent hydrocarbons from spent caustic being transferred into the atmospheric-relief, cone roof storage tank. This procedure was developed in 2005 to mitigate a PSM risk at a tank that had been in service since 1956. An investigation was launched to determine the explosion's cause. Click here to download Process Safety Management Lessons Learned from a Petroleum Refinery Spent Caustic Tank Explosion, Kenneth P. Bloch, Lead Process Reliability Engineer and Dawn M. Wurst, Safety Manager, Flint Hills Resources, and learn the factors that defeated a HAZOP action item's intended purpose to reduce the risk of a PSM failure, which led to a design change that had the opposite effect. Lessons learned are communicated to help organizations avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Follow us on:
  
|
