Management practices protective systems

Housekeeping practices that allow spilled or released combustible or flammable process materials to accumulate could provide fuel for a fire to start or allow more rapid or vigorous fire spread than protection systems can manage. 

Multiple layers of protection are a concept incorporated in the American Chemistry Council Process Safety Code of Management Practices. ) Management Practice number 15 endorses sufficient layers of protection through technology, facilities, and personnel to prevent escalation from a single failure to a catastrophic occurrence. This approach can be applied to multiple system root causes when the investigation team evaluates... 

In most situations, safety is best achieved by an inherently safe process design whenever practicable, combined, if necessary, with a number of protective systems which rely on different technologies (for example, chemical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic, thermodynamic (for example, flame arrestors), programmable electronic) which manage any residual identified risk. Any safety strategy considers each individual safety instrumented system in the context of the other protective systems. To facilitate this approach, this standard... 

Some developed countries used to be faced with the same stormwater problems as China do today. They have developed approved theories and technologies and put them into wide use after decades of study. American BMPs (Best Management Practices), a typical system of 1970s, solves problems related to water quality, water amount and environmental protection... 

There are fundamentally two approaches to environmental protection waste treatment and waste prevention. Treatment systems are well known and are beyond the scope of this discnssion. Some comments on prevention will be presented. These pollntion prevention ideas are similar to the more extensive treatment given in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Manual for Best Management Practices for Pollution Prevention in Textile Processing [1]. 

The design of the plant should be tolerant of human error. To the extent practicable, any inappropriate human actions should be rendered ineffective. For this purpose, the priority between operator action and safety system actuation should be carefully chosen. On the one hand, the operator should not be allowed to override reactor protection system actuation as long as the initiation aiteria for actuation apply. On the other hand, there are simations where operator interventions into the protection system are necessary. Examples are manual bypasses for testing purposes or for adoption of acmation criteria for modifications to the operational state. Furthermore, the operator should have an ultimate possibility, under strict administrative control, to intervene in the protection system for the purposes of managing beyond design basis accidents in the event of major failures within the reactor protection system. 

OSHA deals with fire protection from an employee safety standpoint, and many of the points covered in the OSHA standard are solid management practices for property safety as well. Subpart E, Means of Egress, is taken from NFPA 101-1970, the Life Safety Code. The emphasis of this subpart is on protecting the employee once a fire has started. It informs the employer what to do to protect workers during the fire by addressing egress methods, automatic sprinkler systems, fire alarms, emergency action plans, and fire prevention plans. 

While threat occurrence rates and expected damages are rather easy to evaluate basing respectively on historical threat data and cause-effect anal3 is, vulnerability is often very difficult to account for since it requires the evaluation of the effectiveness/efSciency of possibly novel technological countermeasures. Unfortunately, it is not rare that new security technologies and related management procedures are justified only by intuition, and reveal in practice to be much less effective than expected or advertised. In order to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of protection systems, stochastic models are needed that are able to represent the d3mamic/temporal aspects of threat and countermeasure evolution in the specific installation context. 

The system of protection described in these Fundamentals is intended to be as general as possible so as to achieve consistency of approach in different circumstances. However, exposures resulting from practices and exposures that require interventions are amenable to control to different extents, which necessitates different approaches to the management of protection and safety. 

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