PSM 15th Element: Quality

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) program is nearly two decades old and I believe that the 14 PSM elements provide a good basic framework for facilities to create a safety program. What OSHA PSM lacks is quality metric. Let me explain further. For example, one of the elements of the OSHA PSM is emergency planning. As a part of ...

Worst Disasters

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Generally speaking, 5-6 things have to go wrong for an incident to occur. Furthermore, these events or failures have to occur in a certain sequence. The characteristics of mega disasters is that 5-6 events with fairly low probabilities of occurrence line up.  Such rare incidents are referred to by many names within the risk management community - ...

Risk and Safety

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I had been  away from writing blog posts for last 3 months or so...mainly because of my travel to S. Korea. I have also been kept busy working on adding advanced features to Risk and Safety site. I will unveil them in the coming few months. I hope to get back ...

A Proposed Classification for Reactive Chemicals

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

The reactivity of a chemical or a mixture is normally assessed by thermal analysis. Thus the thermal analysis data forms the basis of risk mitigation decisions. What does the thermal analysis data tell us and how to base risk mitigation decisions? How to tell which compositions are more reactive and ...

Group Additivity Approach for Estimating Reactive Hazards

Friday, October 16th, 2009

During process development or plant operation it is often necessary to estimate energy of reaction based on chemical formulae representation alone. This heat of decomposition represents the potential energy that can be released and is therefore a measure of explosion potential. One can therefore envision that estimation of heats reaction ...

CSB: To Investigate Or Not To Investigate

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Last year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is not meeting its statutory mandate by investigating major chemical accidents. CSB’s Statutory Mandate The Clean Air Amendment Act (CAAA) of 1990 directs CSB to (1) investigate and report on the cause or probable cause of any accidental chemical ...

GAO: CSB Not Meeting Its Statutory Mandates

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

According to a recent report (Aug. 2008) from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is not in compliance with its statutory mandates.  The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents and has been in operation since 1998. GAO report states that ...

Safety Forecast for the 21st Century

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

The 20th century was a time of great technological change that forever transformed how we live and work – changes that necessitated the birth and development of the field of Process Safety Management. The early years saw the evolution of mechanization into assembly lines and true industrialization.  Lack of access ...

Using Thermal Analysis to Identify Reactive Chemicals

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Reactivity hazards involve conversion of stored chemical energy of the components into mechanical or heat energy, andit is the uncontrolled release of this stored energy that causes the damage in a reactive chemical incident. The reactivity of a substance is normally assessed by performing calorimetric measurements. Information about the amount of ...

Functional Groups Indicative of Reactive Hazards

Monday, February 16th, 2009

The presence of certain functional groups is considered an indicator of reactivity. This is the simplest possible reactivity screening method and serves as a guideline for further analysis. For example, chemicals containing the following functional groups can be considered potentially reactive: -NO2 : organic nitro compounds -O-O-, -O-OH : organic/inorganic peroxide and ...