A Best Practice for Managing Process Safety During Turnarounds & Routine Business Cycles

In A Best Practice for Managing Process Safety During Turnarounds & Routine Business Cycles, you'll learn ...

• Each of the fourteen elements of process safety
• How Process Safety Management (PSM) directly impacts a turnaround
• How to manage PSM elements under the constraints of a tight turnaround window

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 3 PDH

Length: 38 pages

Process Safety Management is crucial during a turnaround. It is often overlooked in favor of personal safety, environmental, security, and health concerns. All of these disciplines are important. They all have compliance obligations with OSHA 1910.119 and other subparts of both OSHA and EPA regulations. There are also additional state and even county or local city government regulations.

There are several primary roles that Process Safety Management (PSM) has that directly impacts a turnaround. The most obvious is Management of Change (MOC) and Pre-Start up Safety Review (PSSR). Other PSM elements include incident investigation, operating procedures, mechanical integrity, process safety information, contractors, hot work, employee participation, training, and emergency response & planning in case anything goes wrong. Process Hazard Analysis and LOPA have a small role in that recommendations were most likely developed with these systems that have implementation needs during a turnaround.

If you were counting the number of PSM elements above, you should be at eleven. Compliance audits can be a turnaround item as well, but they should be targeted. Trade secrets are only involved if you have patented processes or equipment to be placed into service during a turnaround. The last of the fourteen elements of PSM is employee participation. Employee participation envelops all of the other elements through awareness, training, and compliance.

How is this course going to assist with managing PSM during a turnaround? It depends. For small facilities that are still under OSHA 1910.119 and are not exempt, PSM is often a one-person show. In large facilities such as the one the author works in, a turnaround can have as many as 10,000 contractors and another 2,000 employees pass through its gate in a single day. This is a larger population than many small towns. The author has also worked at facilities were a turnaround shuts down the entire plant and involves a few hundred employees and a few thousand contractors a day. The diversity in experience affords the author of this course rare expertise of having worked a couple of dozen turnarounds. Many of these were as the lead Process Safety Coordinator. The summation of these learnings will be shared as a best practice in this course.

Many companies practice a motto that “personal safety is everyone’s responsibility.” The same goes for PSM. This only happens if everyone knows how they plug a hole in the PSM cheese slice. Process Safety Incidents present a higher risk to more personnel, community, environment, and personnel than personal safety. In fact, a major process safety event will often trigger the others, whereas a person falling down the stairs only affects themselves. This course is not a comparative of the more impactful safety group. However, when the process does not remain in the pipes, such as would occur with a hydrofluoric acid release, many people, environment, and community impacts can result.

This course will provide a brief overview of each of the fourteen elements of process safety. Then, it will go through each of these elements and how they support turnaround activities. Lastly, we will cover application to improve the management of PSM at your own facility.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• OSHA Regulations for Process Safety Management (PSM) 29 CFR 1910.119
• The fourteen elements of PSM from the OSHA regulation
• “BEST PRACTICE” learnings to manage PSM elements under the constraints of a tight turnaround window
• “BEST PRACTICE” learnings to manage PSM elements during routine work cycles
• Lessons learned to improve your organization at the end of each turnaround

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 15 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.