Incidents That Define Safe Automation

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.