Advisory Committee on Major Hazards

UK Health and Safety Commission. Advisory Committee on Major Hazards. Second Report. 

In process industry plants, the concept of more inherently safe design is a recurring theme in the three reports of the Advisory Committee on Major Hazards (ACMH - set up in the UK after the Flixborough accident). These reports set the general principles of new process industry safety in the UK and they represent in their field what, for example, the IAEA Safety Fundamentals documents do in the nuclear industry. 

After the Flixborough incident in 1974 the HSE appointed a committee of experts, the Advisory Committee on Major Hazards, to consider the health and safety problems posed by major chemical sites and to make recommendations. This they did in three reports which identified a need for three basic elements of control ... 

Risk is tire probability of the hazard actually causing the harm or damage and the severity or consequence of it. Some definitions add a time component. The Second Report of the Advisory Committee on Major Hazards defines risk as the probability that a hazard may be realised at any specified level in a given span of time. The time component adds a dimension to an assessment of an environmental risk compared to an assessment of a safety risk. For example a chemical or combustion process may have a designed life span of 30 to 40 years before being dismantled. 

Health and Safety Executive (1979). Advisory Committee on Major Hazards Second Report. London. HMSO. (ISBN 0-11-883299-9). 

This event led to the creation of the tri-partite (government, industry and union) Advisory Committee on Major Hazards, which developed a system for the regulation of major hazards in industry. ... 

A new approach was therefore called for, and this was the safety case. The major push in the development of the safety case concept was the tri-partite (i.e. government, industry and unions) Advisory Committee on Major Hazards (ACMH), which was formed after the Flixborough disaster. The most important and far-reaching of their recoimnendations was that owners of major hazardous sites/facilities should develop a living safety case. This safety case concept became widely adopted in other industries (e.g. UK MoD) as good HSWA practice. 

Elealth and Safety Executive Advisory Committee on Dangerous Substances (EISE), Major Hazard Aspects of the Transport of Dangerous Substances, London HMSO, 1991. 

ACDS, Major hazard aspect of the transport of dangerous substances, Advisory Committee on Dangerous Substances, Health and Safety Commission, London, 1991 ANSYS INC., ANSYSTM user guide, v.l 1, 2007... 

In the United Kingdom an advisory committee was set up by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to review the problem and recommend procedures for the control of these sites, HSE (1976, 1979). Subsequently, a series of directives and amendments on this subject were issued by the European Economic Commission (EEC), and the EEC directives were implemented in the UK by the publication of the Control of Major Industrial Accident Hazards Regulations, 1984 (the CIMAH regulations). 

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