Plant hazard analysis checklist

Process hazard analysis (PHA) Any of a number of techniques for understanding and managing the risk of a chemical process or plant. Examples of PHA techniques include HAZOP, checklists, what-if methods, fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, and others. 

This checklist may be used to stimulate the thinking of inherent safety review and process hazard analysis teams, and any other individuals or groups working on process improvements. It is intended to promote "blue-sky" or "out-of the-box" thinking, and to generate ideas that might be usable in an existing facility or a "plant of the future" concept. 

Against each of these headings will be specific issues that form the checklist. The hazard analysis in this chapter may not be suitable for larger and more complex facilities, hence other detailed systems may be necessary. To address this, the next chapter on guided word plant analyses will be helpful. 

This generic checklist can help identify hazards and hazard sources in a facility. As you can see, this list is very similar to the two previous appendixes, mixing both functional areas and specific devices. Also, some of the areas overlap, just as they do in many industrial plants. Because there are a plethora of different kinds of facilities around the world and in different industries, this list is only something to help get you started on a facility hazard analysis. 

The site-level health and safety manager was given notice from corporate for the need to conduct the qualitative risk analysis of the plant s hazardous material transportation operations. The safety manager was provided with a questiotmaire regarding all chemicals of concern, shipping quantities, modes of transit, and the route characteristics (similar to the checklist found in Table 4.2). This information was transmitted back to corporate for analysis, which included a corporate-level comparison to the other XYZ Chemical facihties risk results. Based on the information collected at the site level, the following was determined and reviewed by corporate for this facility ... 

Potential external events were identified by reviewing previous Safety Analysis Reports of similar DOE facilities (Restrepo 1995) and the recommended list of external events used to evaluate commercial nuclear power plant risks (NRC 1983). In addition, an attempt was made to identify any other potential external-initiating event unique to the site that had not been considered in previous studies. It is important to note that operational accidents (e.g., criticality, internal fires) occurring inside the HCF and assodated radioactive material storage facilities are not considered in this screening process. These types of "internal initiating events are identified separately using preliminary hazard checklists (see Appendix 3A). 

In the checklist the experience from history, similar plants, etc. is used for analysis. If the technology or system is new and there are few analogous data available, then the checklist method may not be of much use even though it is systematic. The what-if part of the analysis uses the team s creativity and experience to brainstorm potential hazards and major incident situations. So,... 

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