The process safety management regulation was issued in 1992 to address the prevention or minimization of the consequences of catastrophic releases of toxic, reactive, flammable, or explosive chemicals. In the decade leading up to its promulgation, the process industry suffered significant loss events that caused worldwide attention to become focused on reducing the risk of process safety events. To emphasize the importance of safe automation, case studies of previous incidents are presented, including a brief description of the incident and the major lessons to be learned. There are typically many contributors to these incidents and some incidents have become synonymous with certain safety issues, e.g., Texas City 2005 related to siting of temporary and permanent structures. This paper does not make any attempt to replicate these previous lessons learned, but instead focuses on the contribution of inadequate design, installation, testing, maintenance, and operation of the process control and safety systems.

As seen in Process Safety Progress – September 2016.

As seen in Process Safety Progress – December 2016.

Published by William (Bill) L. Mostia, Jr., P.E., FS Engr. TÜV Rheinland Fellow

Presented under the title of “The Interrelationship of Risk Criteria and Conditional Modifiers” at AIChE 2011 Spring Meeting, 7th Global Congress on Process Safety, March 13-16, 2011.

Presented at 3rd CCPS Latin American Process Safety Conference and Expo, Poster Session, Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 8-10, 2011

Presented at 2011 Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center Symposium, College Station, TX. October 25-27, 2011.

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Presented at the 6th Global Congress on Process Safety, March 21-25, 2010, and Texas Chemistry Council/Association of Chemical Industry of Texas 2010 EHS Seminar, June 7-10.

Published in the Journal of Loss Prevention, Nov. 2011

Presented at Mary Kay O’Conner Process Safety Center Symposium, October 2002. Published in Journal of Hazardous Materials, 2003. Presented at ISA EXPO 2003, October 2003.

Presented at Loss Prevention Symposium, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, April 2001. Published in Process Safety Progress, November 2001.

Presented at Loss Prevention Symposium, American Institute of Chemical Engineers Spring Meeting, March 1999. Published as Safeguard Safety Instrumented Systems – Chemical Engineering Progress, November 1999.