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January 29, 2010

Learnings from Process Safety Seminar

Today I attended the Process Safety Seminar conducted by ICC at Chennai, where I had presented a paper on "Management of Change". The learning's from the seminar are as follows:
1. In an incident involving a blast wave, a magnetic hatch on the top of an ethylene tank flew open due to the blast wave as the hatch cover was facing the blast wave and the hinge was on the other side. This allowed ethylene to come out and add to the fire. One of the lessons learnt is - during a HAZOP study look at these issues. It may be a simple issue but an important one.
2. In another incident, a fired heater was supported on fireproofed support legs. During an incident of a coil rupture and a fire, the fire proofed support legs withstood the fire but the vertical metallic stack which was about 20 m in height could not and toppled on other equipment.
3. In a runaway reaction incident where the reactor exploded, the investigator was trying to determine the thermo chemistry of the reaction in a experimental set up. Unfortunately, the reaction temperature increased so rapidly that it destroyed the equipment in the lab! Luckily no one was injured.
4. IS14489:98 (Bureau of Indian Standards - Code of practice on Occupational health and safety audit)- this focuses mainly on OHS issues. However, a committee has updated it with process safety elements also, but the updated code of practice is yet to be released.
5. There was also talk about behaviour based safety, but I am not a fan of BBS. There is a good article from a union's perspective. See the pdf file "the steelworker perspective on behavioral safety"in this link

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