Management systems hazardous facilities

Environmental management systems including facilities for hazardous waste disposal >- Emergency procedure for visitors and contractors >- Hazard information to prospective customers as part of the supply chain management. 

In the course of assessing your company s current PSM status, you and your team have almost certainly gained a clear sense of which facilities pose the greatest risk, whether by virtue of inherent process hazards, human factors, management systems, or a combination. As you set priorities for implementation you should closely review information gleaned from the assessment tasks. In addition, you should try to validate or flesh out your impressions through some more quantitative analysis that can help to identify priority facilities. 

These process safety management systems help ensure that facilities are designed, constructed, operated, and maintained with appropriate controls in place to prevent serious accidents. However, despite these precautions, buildings close to hazardous process plants have presented serious risks to the people who work in them. This observation is prompted by the fact that some buildings, because of their design and construction, have collapsed when subjected to comparatively moderate accidental explosions, with serious injury or fatality to the occupants. Conversely, experience indicates that personnel located outdoors and away from such buildings, if subjected to the same blast, may have a lower likelihood of serious injury or fatality. 

In addition to the evaluation of chemical process hazards, and the proper applications of the evaluation to process design and operation, the management systems are important to assure operation of the facilities as intended. Brief introductions into hazard identification and quantification, and into management controls from the perspective of process safety are presented in Chapter 4. Future trends are also briefly reviewed here. 

A comprehensive system to manage process hazards should also have other elements, in addition to those listed in Table 2.1. As such, Table 2.2 lists elements included in CCPS, OSHA/EPA, and Seveso II programs that are not explicitly addressed in this publication. This is not intended to imply that these other elements are unimportant. For example, all facilities handling hazardous materials and energies should engage in emergency... 

The new management system must be in place and functional before introducing chemical reactivity hazards to the facility. Leaving the development of the management system to be done on an ad hoc basis after startup is equivalent to communicating right up front that production has priority over the management of chemical reactivity hazards. 

As mentioned earlier, most facilities need not start from scratch when seeking to effectively manage chemical reactivity hazards. Elements of a hazards management system, such as an emergency response plan or a... 

Table 2.3 gives one way for an existing facility to get started toward successfully managing chemical reactivity hazards. This assumes you already have an idea as to what chemical reactivity hazards must be addressed by the management system, such as by answering the questions in the Preliminary Screening Method of Chapter 3. 

As the Figure 4.1 flowchart implies, managing chemical reactivity hazards starts with a management system. To prevent incidents, a facility must not only be well designed, but also properly operated and maintained. A commitment to safety from all levels of management is essential, to ensure that all safety aspects receive adequate priority. In practice, conflicts of interest may arise between safety and other goals such as production demands and... 

An essential practice for managing chemical reactivity hazards is to gather chemical reactivity data on the chemicals likely to be present at your facility. This can be done based either on a current chemical inventory, or on a list of chemicals expected to be present. In either case, your management system must also include a means of detecting and checking any new or variant chemicals brought onsite for the first time. 

Managing chemical reactivity hazards so that uncontrolled chemical reactions are avoided is an ongoing endeavor, throughout the facility lifetime. Establishing a management system to ensure chemical reactivity hazards are identified and controlled is likewise not a one-time project. The man-... 

The Organization Resources Counselors (ORC) document emphasized the application of management control systems to facilities processing highly hazardous chemicals. The... 

The ORC document emphasized the application of management control systems to facilities processing highly hazardous chemicals. The ORC report helped form a new law within the United States. The new standard, OSHA 1910.119, Process Safety Management of Highly Hazardous Chemicals, is part of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations and was drafted in July 1990, and implemented on May 26, 1992. 

The application of management systems to the identification, understanding, and control of process hazards to prevent process-related injuries and incidents it is focused on prevention of, preparedness for, mitigation of, response to, and restoration from catastrophic releases of chemicals or energy from a process associated with a facility. 

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