Process Safety with Trish & Traci

The workplace can be so much more for colleagues than simply doing a job and going home. If you want to succeed, you need to listen and communicate as it's the currency of safety.

Practice, practice and more practice makes great emergency response but be careful of the message you are sending.

Unlike the oil industry, we can set the foundation of embedding inherently safer design into how we manage hydrogen going forward.

This can be a heated topic and it can get politicized. We need to make sure we're really applying inherently safer design principles when we pick the concept that we are going with, let alone do the engineering down the track

Grandfathered standards from the 1950s along with incorrect blueprints led to loss of life and reputation.

A revolutionary process safety program at a refinery in Blaine, Washington presents challenges in the best ways possible -- by helping operators develop new skills and flex new muscles. It’s always a good day when somewhere in the world a new process-safety champion has been formed.

This episode looks back on the deadly dust explosion that occurred at Didion Milling in Cambria, Wisconsin. On May 31, 2017, the explosion killed five workers and injured 15 others.

In mid-May 2022 a federal grand jury indicted the operator and six management officials on nine criminal counts, including two counts related to willful violations of federal workplace safety standards for grain handling.

The war in Ukraine and the anniversary of Chernobyl bring to light lessons learned from the past and unfortunate worries of today.

Process safety is impacted by automation, robotics, devices and solutions. Whether the impact is positive or negative remains in the hands of humans who implement the technology.

What went wrong at the Piper Alpha oil rig has taught us a lot about permit-to-work systems. They are in place to ensure control of the ownership and activities of a particular piece of equipment -- it’s about keeping people safe and also understanding the status of your plant.

Good process safety means good reliability …  good reliability means good productivity … good productivity is what makes us money. Sometimes you have to talk about the bottom line in order to get buy-in for process-safety initiatives.

A review of 2021’s process-safety incidents points out that there's nothing new in any of these events; there's no new technology pathway, there's no new chemical reaction or law of chemistry or physics. That means these are all preventable incidents. What are you doing at your facilities to understand these hazards?

If you're relying on humans getting it right every time, you're going to have an incident. The key is making sure your systems are more resilient to humans making a mistake

The chemical industry has been doing risk assessment the same way for quite some time. This new method focuses on subtle changes, which can lead to degradation of design safeguards.

IChemE’s Trish Kerin ponders that $64,000 question as she and Traci Purdum look back at lessons learned from the Montara oil field incident in 2009. 

Was the Seveso accident, which released dioxin in the air and was named by Time magazine as one of the top manmade environmental disasters, a black swan event? Not likely, according to Trish Kerin, director of the IChemE Safety Centre. On the 45th anniversary of this catastrophic event, we take a look at lessons learned.

A money-grab hack prompted executive orders to get cybersecurity under control at firms supplying the government. Private companies will have to comply even if they aren’t the primary contractor. 

Preparing for the worst is in a facility’s best interest. Indeed, in 2020 there were over 800 natural and man-made disasters that resulted in $4.5 trillion in damages.

This episode of Process Safety with Trish & Traci features Dale Sands, an expert in risk reduction and resiliency.

The catastrophic incident at the Fukushima power plant 10 years ago started long before an earthquake and tsunami wiped out power and caused three reactor meltdowns -- the real problem started in 1967 when the plant was built in a tsunami-prone area. The lessons learned from this disaster can save others.

Advertising so many days since the last injury can do more harm than good at a facility. The absence of an incident doesn't mean the presence of safety. Focusing on the correct indicators can help you intervene and potentially change the future. In this episode, Trish & Traci prove when the measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.