System safety tenets

With the fundamentals of this chapter in mind and the experience of a career in the field, there are certain written and unwritten basics that are worth repeating because of their vital importance to the safety practitioner. These are the essential actions needed to perform the system safety undertakings  

Systematically identify, evaluate, and control hazards in order to prevent (or mitigate) accidents. 

Apply a precedence of controls to hazards starting with their elimination, designing to preclude hazards, and finally administrative controls. Administrative controls include signs, warnings, procedures, and training. (The lowest precedence are those controls that rely on people.) 

Perform proactively rather than reacting to events. This starts with a program plan. 

Design and build safety into a system rather than modifying the system later in the acquisition process when any changes are increasingly more expensive. 

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In the strictest sense, system safety encompasses process safety and the two are inextricably linked. Since systems are defined to include processes, process safety may be considered a subset of system safety. The application of appropriate system safety tenets to the chemical process industry follows. In the process industry, the system safety practitioner continues his or her quest to identify, evaluate, analyze, and eliminate or control hazards throughout the life cycle of the process (in this case). The precedence of controls remains the same. So, there is a close relation between system and chemical process safety and the process industry. 

In spite of, or maybe because of, process industry accidents still occurring in various industries and the increasing complexity of industrial processes (especially with industrial control systems using cyber networks), the CCPS continues to push the envelope on process safety and safety in general with their Vision 2020. The purpose of Vision 2020 is to imagine what perfect process safety will look like. The vision is to have industry stakeholders to have demonstrable and actionable commitment to the competencies and processes to prevent, reduce, and mitigate process safety incidents (not just accidents). They do this through five tenets for industry and four societal themes (Center for Chemical Process Safety, 2013). Their five tenets for industry or core principles are... 

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