Major hazards onshore and

Manchester, 20-22 October 1992

This Conference, organized by the North West Branch of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, was dominated by the UK Health and Safety Executive. Of the nine papers in the plenary session, seven were written, in whole or in part, by the staff of HSE or their bedfellows, the Safety and Reliability Directorate of the Atomic Energy Auth- ority. These papers were selected for the plenary session on their merits, not because the HSE had any special influence. I know of no other country where the staff of a regulatory organixa- tion can command so much respect amongst their fellow technologists.

A few years ago I complained that safety conferences consisted mainly of papers on the three Es: Equipment for making plants safer, Equations for calculating effects and the results of Experiments, and that reports of acci- dents and the actions needed to prevent them happening again were too few. The recent conference was even further removed from what I regard as the

offshore

core of loss prevention. Many papers described policies and procedures for implementing them. Good as these papers were, by the third day I began to feel that I had been invited to a dinner where all we got were menus to read. Excellent as the menus were, after a while one begins to feel that something is lacking. And, one won- ders, are all these policies really fol- lowed on the ground?

The papers have been published as the Instiru~ion of Chemical Engineers Symposium Series No I30 and the fol- lowing are some of the papers that 1 thought particularly worthy of note:

When management is poor, equip- ment fails more often, but how often? In two papers N. W. Hurst of HSE and co-workers described a technique for auditing management quality and deriving a factor by which equipment failure rates can be multiplied. A paper on permits-to-work by S. Scott (also of HSE) produced a lively

discussion, suggesting that many delegates, especially those involved in plant operations, would welcome more papers on operating problems.

l F. K. Crawley et al. described HAZID, a technique for identifying low probability, high consequence events and roughly estimating their frequency. These events, they said, are often missed during HAZOP.

l R. T. Canaway reviewed the methods used by insurers for estimating maximum losses.

l G. C. Stevens and A. M. Humphries showed how loss size varies with probability.

l C. Nussey et al. described RISKAT, the HSE’s risk assessment tool.

Trevor Kletz Cheadle Hulme,

Cheadle, Cheshire, UK

J. Loss Prev. Process hd., 1993, Vol 6, No 4 269