Process Hazard Management Services

As I celebrated my retirement from a corporate staff position, a number of people commented on my passion for process safety. That caused me to reflect on the source of that passion.

Over the 35 years of working in industry, I saw the effects of serious process incidents on people, businesses and the chemical industry.

My first experience was Sam, an hourly worker whose arms were striped by skin grafts. He was torching a hole in a “non-hazardous” chemical pipe when it flashed and burned his arms, chest & neck.

As a rookie process engineer, I was responsible for a process that used Acetic Anhydride, a corrosive chemical that forms acetic acid when exposed to moisture. The operator adding this material to the batch he lost his grip on the charging tube and was splashed in the eyes. Although he was wearing the required PPE, it wasn’t adequate to protect him. Fortunately, his sight was not damaged by the event.

At the ripe old age of 25, I became a Production Supervisor for a production crew. I understood my production responsibilities, but the sobering assignment was to safeguard the safety of each of those workers; as my supervisor put it,” Send each of them home to their families in the same condition as the came here”. That was a tall order especially with a young, inexperienced crew and supervisor.

Later in my career, I was a project engineer and installing a control system a one of our plants. The tight timeline caused us to work double shifts and I was overseeing the night shift. One morning as I came out of the shower, the TV was announcing a tragic accident at our plant – the one where my project team and construction crew were working. It took a few attempts before I could verify the location of the event and that my team was safe. Unfortunately, 3 contractor employees died in a confined space entry accident.

Another instance was an afternoon phone call while on vacation. The Engineering Manager told me we had an explosion at one of our plants and I was assigned to lead the reconstruction team. Three people has died in that explosion, I knew 2 of them. I can’t explain the emotion of walking through that building to assess the damage and prepare a plan to rebuild it, but I can still see the twisted steel, the blacked equipment and hear the dripping of the fire protection water. As I have told many, “It changes what you think about when you go to church”.

Yet another incident occurred at the plant where I had been a process engineer and production supervisor. The staff safety department was alerted of an incident, and I was called into a conference room with our management team to describe the area and equipment involved in the event. Our minds were reeling with questions, about the location, process and damages. I wondered about who had been involved, even though I knew there were no fatalities.

What do all these events add up to? Did I work for companies with poor safety programs? Did I happen to be “unlucky” across my career? No, the companies I worked for had good safety records and effective safety programs. These experiences came across 35 years that paralleled the early days of OSHA and preceded the PSM regulation by 20 years.

Is my memory “too good”? Yes, and for that I am thankful.

Our memories and experiences shape who we are, how we think and hopefully how we act. To me, this means that I am actively trying to advance process safety through my professional life. It means I use these events and others across the industry to punctuate the process training and hazard analyses I perform.

Incidents are warnings that bad things can happen, even to good companies and operations. Our challenge is to keep these events alive in our company cultures so people learn from them. Actual events in a remind us that,”It can happen here!!”

The number of serious events in the chemical industry has fallen due to regulatory influences and improved systems. As the number of events hopefully continues to fall, it becomes more difficult to position them as learning experiences. We need to retain the memories no matter how painful they may be so they remain a vivid reminder of what CAN occur.

And that, my friends is why I am passionate about Process Safety