Hazardex Conference at PEFTEC 2017 sponsored by CorDEX

Presentation Title: Effective Learning as an Industry

Speaker: Dr. Tijs Koerts, Operations Director European Process Safety Centre

Dr. Tijs Koerts worked at DuPont, GE Plastics and Lyondell Basell Industries, where he was involved in all kinds of hazardous processes in both technical, operational and business roles. He is currently Operations Director at the European Process Safety Centre.

The high hazard and process industries have been involved in disasters that have had a profound effect on society and the political climate is becoming ever less forgiving of these incidents.

When the consequence is significant, industry has always been willing to investigate and develop new management processes and technical measures that are broadly implemented. At the same time, governments realise they have a role to play and develop regulations such as the Seveso series to control the hazards of chemical processes. Nevertheless, legislation is a blunt tool, as governments have insufficient technical knowledge and will never be able to explain in detail how to run processes in a safe way.

This means industry has an obligation to learn as an industry. One of the most important ingredients for continuous improvement is derived from incidents and near misses. While each company has a system to register and investigate these, the implementation of lessons learned across wider industry is more difficult.

The European Process Safety Centre wants to improve process safety awareness and competency across the wider industry by sharing incidents and near misses that have a broad learning potential. EPSC's Learning Sheets are based on actual cases and are framed to ensure the points raised will provoke discussion and will lodge in the memory.

Rather than prescribing how to avoid a specific incident, Learning Sheets focus on best practices to reduce the likelihood of similar incidents at other locations.

Presentation Title: What have we achieved after 20 years of Functional Safety standards?

Speaker: Tino Vande Capelle - FS Senior Expert (TinoVC, # 0109/05, SIS)

Tino Vande Capelle has worked in a variety of disciplines in the LNG, Petrochemical, Refining and Petroleum Industries and is a Senior Functional Safety Expert (TÜV Rheinland) and Trainer for Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) with the International TÜV Rheinland Functional Safety program.

What have we achieved after 20 years of Functional Safety standards in the process industry? Why does it remain so difficult to learn from mistakes others have made in our industry? Would you rather learn from the mistakes of others or make them all yourself? Certainly, you will learn better by making your own mistakes, but those lessons can come with extreme high risk and cost. As Mr. T. Kletz once stated: "Accidents are not due to lack of knowledge, but failure to use the knowledge we have."

The presentation will begin with a short overview of some of the major accidents followed by a discussion on how these accidents have influenced the safety standards & culture. New technologies and lessons learned from applying the first revision of the 'good engineering' performance based standards have led to the maintenance teams collecting all comments, problems and suggestions to release the second edition of those standards. The IEC/EN 61508 Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related systems standard edition 2.0 released in April 2010 and the IEC/EN 61511 Functional Safety for Safety Instrumented Systems for the Process Industry edition 2.0 released in February 2016 are still being ignored, miss understood or simply manipulated to suits the needs for either the manufacture and/or the end users.

Having personally trained more than 2000 people with a Functional Safety competency scheme during the last 13 years, having performed many Functional Safety assessments on international projects and client sites, I find it extremely frustrating to conclude that many engineers are only interested in calculating a PFD value (Probability to Fail Dangerous on demand, a frequency used to express the availability of a safety system) leading to a SIL number (Safety Integrity Level). They use either simplified formulas or sophisticated commercial calculation tools not understanding all parameters and entries in the package, entering failure data that is either too generic or not relevant for their projects, but all result in to a report that is often not even worth the paper it was printed on.

The real reason WHY we have functional safety standards is NOT for 'ONLY' calculating failure rates, human failures cannot be predicted, cannot be controlled neither can be calculated. The latest update of the IEC61511:2016 has in the normative part 1 more focus on Functional Safety Assessments and Management for the simply reason to aim to AVOID human failure by improving the performance, quality and competency of every human working in the lifecycle of our process industry in order to achieve adequate safety culture keeping their plant safe, productive and avoid very costly penalties and lawsuits if things go wrong like in the past have been proven.

Presentation Title: Cyber Security in the industrial environment

Speaker: Stephen Smith, Onrix

Stephen Smith is a Brussels-based independent advisor on digital security risks. He has spent more than 30 years in the ICT industry with a focus on information security and dedicated these past 10 years on risks associated with industrial control systems.

Cybersecurity is often represented in the media through malware and hacking attacks. But little is written about the cause and effect of such attacks. I will present pragmatic considerations concerning the problems and mitigation activities of cybersecurity; this inevitably centres on the human factor.

Safety and quality activities in all industrial environments focus on the people and their actions; security is no different, it is much of the same in disguise. Unfortunately, the disguise is presented as complex and forbidding. I aim to shine some common sense on the subject and demystify the subject.

Presentation Title: Good Practices: Keep Industrial fireproofing fit for purpose throughout its technical life

Speaker: Jeanne van Buren, Marsh Risk Consulting

Jeanne van Buren is a senior consultant at Marsh Risk Consulting and has worked in high hazard industries as a specialist in industrial fire safety for more than three decades.

Over the past two decades awareness about ageing assets has increased and the effect of ageing on the losses suffered in industry can be substantiated by collected data. This awareness mainly focuses on industrial process installations. Safety in industry would benefit from similar attention being paid to ageing of fire protection provision, which is often the last barrier between a controlled incident and a disaster.

Fire protection provision covers an array of topics such as: Construction (the fire resistance of buildings and fireproofing of load bearing columns and supports); (Semi-) Fixed and Mobile Installations; and Organisational aspects.

The presentation addresses Cementitious and Epoxy-based fireproofing, used in industry for exposure to hydrocarbon pool fires. Except for explosions, which are not addressed here, this situation can present the most demanding conditions for fireproofing. Keeping fireproofing fit for purpose should start in the planning phase. Failing to do so may result in fireproofing not providing the anticipated time of protection. Also, failing to follow the procedures described in producer manuals can have far-reaching consequences for the fire resistance of the fireproofing. Not following recommended practices for inspection, testing and maintenance of fireproofing can also affect the performance of the fireproofing.

Presentation Title: Pre Incident Planning and Philosophy of Response to LOPC incidents

Speaker: Kevin Boffy, Evolution Risk Assurance

Kevin Boffy started out in Cleveland Fire Service in the UK before specialising in high hazard industry fire safety and risk management. He is currently Managing Director of Evolution Risk Assurance.

The presentation will focus on the need for a holistic approach to the planning for large scale incidents that may lead to the loss of primary containment of hazardous materials including fire fighting foam. The presentation will touch on the need for pre incident plans and also the wider impact of the effects of effective management of change towards more environmentally friendly fire fighting foams and how this effects response at all levels of businesses. The presentation will reference the LASTFIRE risk assessment framework for dealing with these incidents.

The presentation will reference the current trend towards fluorine free foams and the totality of the impact of achieving this. The presentation will seek to highlight problems that can arise in the movement towards fluorine free foams such as material compatibility and performance differentials and how this can be managed when identifying credible scenarios.

The final element of the presentation will highlight problems that have arisen from ineffective management of change in incidents that have involved loss of primary containment leading to environmental damage, reputational damage and how this can be avoided.

Presentation Title: Chemistry of firefighting foams for use in the high hazard sector

Speaker: John-Olav Ottesen, Dafo Fomtec