Major Accident Ordinance

Accident an event such as an emission, a fire or an explosion of major impact, which leads to a disturbance of the specified operation in a site or a plant subject to this ordinance (Author s remark this refers to the Major Accident Ordinance [4]), which leads immediately or at a later stage to a serious hazard or material damage within or outside the site involving one or several hazardous substances as listed in annex VI part 1 para I no. 4. 

In order to give an impression of standards achieved in the German process industry the following assessment is made. The accident statistics [15] shows that there was no fatal accident involving members of the public during 10 years of operation of the 7,800 plants subject to the Major Accident Ordinance [14]. On this basis a Bayesian zero-event statistics leads to a coarse assessment of 6.4 X 10 a for a fatality outside a plant (vid. Example 9.4). 

It makes sense to carry out the safety tasks according to an established procedural framework, which together with the corresponding management organization (hierarchy with clear responsibilities) constitutes a safety management system (cf. [7]). The demonstration that such a safety management system has been implemented is required by the Major Accident Ordinance [8]. 

The criterion for assigning equipment to the safety system is that if it did not exist, harm to man, environment or property would have to be expected. It imphes as well a serious hazard in the sense of the Major Accident Ordinance [8]. 

In the sense of the Major Accident Ordinance the safety system is an accident preventing measure and as such is safety relevant. In order to avoid as far as possible that the safety system is activated, its activation is in many cases preceded by that of a monitoring system. 

The damage limiting system (mitigation) does not avoid the occurrence of the undesired event (e.g. release of a hazardous material), but serves to limit its impact (e.g. triggering a water curtain to absorb the released gas). In the sense of the Major Accident Ordinance the damage limiting system is safety relevant (assignment to level 4 in Table 4.1). 

During a period of observation of ten years no accident with a fatality outside the plant was registered in [23] in any of the approximately 7,800 plants subject to the Major Accident Ordinance (German implementation of the Seveso Directive). 

Damage causing factor Limit value Valuation according to the Major Accident Ordinance (StorfallV)... 

Hazards resulting from the use of work equipment, from the process and the handling of hazardous substances as well as those resulting from an accident have to be distinguished. Protection from the former is regulated primarily in the labour protection act [1] and the occupational safety [2] and hazardous substance [3] ordinances protection from the consequences of major accidents is regulated in [4]. 

Active barriers are to a large extent dependent on activities in the day-to-day operation. Many of them are established and maintained through the different activities to allocate resources and to control production, including the allocation and supervision of personnel, control of work material and technical systems, co-ordination of activities and housekeeping. The individual operators play a significant role in the immediate control of accident risks by detecting and avoiding hazards. In case of major accident risks, the technical control systems will usually take over from the operators, if they fail to keep the production process within accepted limits. 

A first small step was to centralise European major hazard policy with articles in the directive giving the Commission co-ordinating powers with respect to the monitoring and reporting of the implementation in different countries and the reporting of incidents by the member states to the Commission. The directive was amended twice. The first time after the Bhopal accident (1984, 2500 people died) and the second time after the Sandoz accident (1986, 500.000 fish died). 

The factor analysis revealed that the tests covered six major areas attention. involuntary control of motor functions, stability of behavior, co-ordination, reaction time, and intelligence. The factor with the highest loading on the accident criterion was the attention factor, followed by involuntary control of motor functions, stability and adaptability of behavior. Negative aspects associated with the accidents were insecurity, tension, and neuroticism. 

---