“It always seems impossible until done.” — Nelson Mandela There are dozens of motivational posters available that encourage us all to believe that we can do the impossible. They intend to inspire us to reach for the stars. But there is also a dark side to achieving the impossible. It’s when the impossible we are [...]
“…there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it, it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead)…” — Neil Gaiman, in American Gods Erwin Schrödinger never intended his thought experiment about a cat in box to launch [...]
“My first customer was a lunatic. My second had a death wish.” — Karl Benz We want to get safer. We invest enormous resources in making the world a safer place. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t seem like we’re making much progress, especially when we’ve just experienced a catastrophic event. Instead, it seems like we just [...]
“It’s very hard for all of us, when we’ve committed ourselves to a particular interpretation, to change our minds.” — Donald Johanson We were recently asked if a steam boiler was a PSM-covered process. The answer seemed obvious. No, steam boilers, themselves, are not covered under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Process Safety Management [...]
“Maybe tone it down with the explosions.” — Michael Bay Most of what we know about explosions is wrong. Most of what we “know” about explosions is what we’ve learned from the movies, which is the only thing called an explosion that we ever see. But what we see in the movies are not explosions, [...]
“You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn’t care.” — Clayton Christensen In May 1946, a scientist at Los Alamos was demonstrating the criticality of plutonium. The demonstration consisted of lowering the upper hemisphere of a spherical shell around a mass of plutonium. As he lowered it, however, it slipped and completed the spherical shell, causing [...]
“They’ve thought of everything. Everything, that is, but their own failure.” — K. Austin Collins I recently watched the 1964 movie, Fail Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet. It reminded me of a dangerous misconception I frequently encounter during process hazard reviews. If you are not familiar with the movie, it came out shortly after the [...]
“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” — Alec Issigonis Good process design results in a process that is more likely to work. Great process design results in a process that is even less likely to not work. Great process design is not the result of compromise and trade-offs, but of a singular [...]
“At the end of this day, one shall stand, one shall fall.” — Optimus Prime, Transformers: The Movie I have never been to a process plant that could continue running without electrical power. So, it is not uncommon to see a plant with two separate electrical feeds, each with their own transformers. On most days, [...]
“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound, he pulls the spitting high tension wires down.” — Buck Dharma, Blue Öyster Cult The preferred design of a safety function is one that deenergizes to trip. That is, a function that goes to the safe state when all sources of energy have been removed. The probability [...]
