Eight Ideas for Sharing Process Safety with Your Kids

“I was looking for a way to do meaningful work and seeing how much satisfaction my father derived from his job made me see it was a profession I should be considering.”  — Elizabeth Auld With stay-at-home orders still in place in many jurisdictions, and good sense dictating them even as the orders are lifted, [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:01:26-06:00May 7th, 2020|Chemicals, Current Events, Process Safety|Comments Off on Eight Ideas for Sharing Process Safety with Your Kids

Human Response: An Effective Safeguard?

“Shallow men believe in luck; wise and strong men in the cause and effect." – Ralph Waldo Emerson In process safety, one important aspect of assessing risk is determining what safeguards are in place to protect against a hazard. Often, we see teams credit human response as a safeguard, sometimes relying on the response as [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:03:44-06:00April 30th, 2020|Process Safety, Process Safety Management|Comments Off on Human Response: An Effective Safeguard?

Managing Process Safety: Lessons from the Pandemic

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”  — Samuel Johnson COVID-19, with its 14-day – fortnight – incubation period has had the effect of concentrating some of the best minds in the world. I have read several articles recently where the authors suggest how the [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:07:21-06:00April 23rd, 2020|Current Events, Process Safety|Comments Off on Managing Process Safety: Lessons from the Pandemic

What If There Was No PSM Standard?

“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”  — Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn We love to hate regulations. The harder it is to comply with them, the more we hate them. [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:12:19-06:00March 26th, 2020|Process Safety, Process Safety Management|Comments Off on What If There Was No PSM Standard?

Process Safety: How Far We’ve Come

“Life is a journey and not a destination.”  — Lynn H. Hough When Richard Nixon signed OSHA into law in 1970, the United States was looking at 14,000 work-related fatalities per year. With a workforce of about 70 million full-time equivalents, the work-related fatality rate was about 20 fatalities per 200,000,000 hours worked. In 2018, [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:14:12-06:00March 12th, 2020|Current Events, Process Safety, Process Safety Management|Comments Off on Process Safety: How Far We’ve Come

Villains, Victims, and Heroes in Process Safety

“You’re a hero one day, you’re a villain another day.”  — Vincent Tan Every good story is a story of conflict. It has a villain. It has a victim. And in the best stories, it has a hero. The story of a process incident or scenario is no different. It has villains—causes. It has victims—receptors, [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:20:09-06:00February 6th, 2020|Process Safety, Process Safety Management, Workplace Safety|Comments Off on Villains, Victims, and Heroes in Process Safety

Inconceivable: Unrecognized Hazards

“You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  - Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride I find the phrase “While we never anticipate a loss of cabin pressure…” incredibly annoying.  To anticipate means to think of something that will or might happen in the [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:26:37-06:00December 5th, 2019|Process Safety, Risk Assessment, Safety Lifecycle|1 Comment

Out of the Blocks: Credit for Human Response

“Fear is often our immediate response to uncertainty.”  — Gabrielle Bernstein In 2001, when the CCPS book, Layer of Protection Analysis: Simplified Process Risk Assessment, “the purple book”, stated that human response is “a relatively weak protection layer” and “less reliable than engineering controls”, many people were willing to accept that piece of conventional wisdom. [...]

Dia de los Muertos: Remembering the Dead

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  — George Santayana Our offices on Cherokee Street exist in the midst of a vibrant Hispanic community. So here in our neighborhood, Dia de los Muertos is in getting in full swing and will be observed through November 2. Dia de los Muertos, the [...]

By |2019-11-09T22:22:19-06:00October 31st, 2019|Chemicals, Current Events, Process Safety, Workplace Safety|Comments Off on Dia de los Muertos: Remembering the Dead

Size Matters: Sampling for PSM Compliance Audits

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”  — Oscar G. Foellinger, 1927 As an engineering student, I once used empirical data to solve a design problem. The approach gave a reasonable answer, but my professor scolded me. “Mere curve fitting,” he sneered. “Good engineering requires working from first principles.” I didn’t agree then, [...]

By |2025-01-17T10:30:02-06:00October 24th, 2019|Process Safety|Comments Off on Size Matters: Sampling for PSM Compliance Audits
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