Towards effective management of major hazard facilities

The operators of Major Hazard Facilities (MHFs) have paramount obligation to provide a safe working environment as well as to prevent major accidents. An ongoing research by the authors aims to study specific legislative requirements for the prevention of major accidents in Australia, UK, EU and US with the intent to identify whether they adequately address the prevention of major accidents. Eight major accident cases were selected based on size, consequence and the estimated cost of the accident. Four out of five examples present accidents from the petrochemical industry. The common root causes of accidents across all five examples were compared against common legislation requirements to determine the degree in which legislation addresses the prevention of major accidents. The research methods primarily include extensive literature reviews (e.g. legislations, regulatory arrangements) and knowledge-mining from case-studies on major accidents. The discussions in this paper include: (a) a basic comparison of legislative/ regulatory arrangements for MHFs in industrialised countries (e.g. Australia, UK, US, Europe); (b) brief discussion on goal-setting vs prescriptive legislation and (c) a snapshot summary of lessons learned from case-studies on major accidents

Consequence-based decision making in a risk-based regulated regime

Fifteen contractor staff died in 2005 Texas City accident when a "350 feet" BP company rule was breached. Was the mandated rule adequate or was it a rule overruled by a bias on-site risk-based decision? Is it reasonable for such ineffective rules to override a potentially rational risk-based decision or can a converse overtake option still be acceptable? Whist a risk-based approach admits that risk is inevitable, a consequence-based approach disregards the likelihood of an event and thus rejects the concept of risk, known as a product of consequence and likelihood. Consequence-based decisions are mainly made to eliminate the risk rather than reducing it to an acceptable level. Should senior management in control of major accident/ high hazard facilities adopt any safety strategies based on consequence? How would such strategies differ under a risk based-model using high consequence, low frequency events and demonstrating that the risk is reduced to a level that is as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) by a reasonable list of preventative and/ or mitigative controls, e.g. as regulated in the Safety Case regime and based on the concept of "duty of care"? A set of discussions from our research are outlined in this paper, which include key findings and comparisons between consequence estimations using the quantity distance rule and risk-based assessments in defining safety strategies in the manufacturing and storage of explosives in Australia