Process Safety Management safe limits

Process Safety Management is an ongoing process, involving all managers, employees and contract workers that aims to minimize uncontrolled change from design and/or operating intent and to keep the process within its safe limits. 

The development and management of high quality technical information, particularly the safe upper and lower limit values, can be difficult and time-consuming but it is a vital activity. Without a sound information base, the quality of all of the other elements of the process safety program will always be in doubt. Therefore, it is critical that high priority be given to the development and maintenance of a high quality technical database. 

Safety management is also concerned with influencing human behaviour, and with limiting the opportunities for mistakes to be made which would result in harm or loss. To do this, safety management must take into account the ways in which people fail (fail to do what is expected of them and/or what is safe), and Chapter 11 contains an outline of those ways. Generally, safety management techniques are aimed at the recognition and elimination of hazards, and the assessment and control of those risks which remain. Many risks cannot be confined to the construction process - there are overlaps with clients, other contractors and third parties. 

Precaution and Environmental Science. When the precautionary principle is discussed in its relationship to science, it is often portrayed as an antiscience or a risk-management principle that is only used after undergoing conventional scientific processes. As discussed earlier, in practice the limitations of science to characterize complex risks show that precaution is not at odds (Kriebel et al., 2001). Further, precaution is not just about additional safety factors or changing risk assessment default assumptions. Research by U.S. EPA scientists has demonstrated that many of the EPA s Reference Doses - or conservative safe exposures - may correspond to risks of greater than 1 in 1000, meaning that safety factors alone may not protect health (Castorina and Woodruff, 2003). 

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