How Should Potential Hazards Be Identified and Evaluated

Frank Lees begins chapter 8 of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Hazard Identification and Safety Audit, [14] with the following paragraphs  

The identification of areas of vulnerability and of specific hazards is of fundamental importance in loss prevention. Once these have identified, the battle is more than half won. 

Such identification is not a simple matter, however. In many ways it has become more difficult as the depth of technology has increased. Loss prevention tends increasingly to depend on the management system and it is not always easy to discover the weaknesses in this. The physical hazards also no longer lie on the. surface, accessible to simple visual inspection. 

On the other hand, there is now available a whole battery of safety audit and hazxtrd identification methods to solve these problems. 

No single identification procedure can be considered the best for all companies or all situations. Large refineries and large single-train industrial chemical producers with limited products and large technical staffs will by nature approach their reviews differently than specialty batch operations for making limited campaigns of products which are herbicides, insecticides, and other specialty chemicals. 

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