Strategy to define risk reduction measures in PHA

Hope you and your families are keeping safe from COVID. I have been away from writing for some time now as I took up a new professional role in July and had a lot going on. But one of my new year resolutions was to again start writing the blog and share valuable information with you all. Today I am writing about a strategy one can opt for while providing recommendations in a PHA in order to ensure the provision of effective safeguards.

Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) identifies and evaluates hazardous scenarios forming an initiating event - consequence of interest pair. Evaluating a hazardous scenario helps to determine the adequacy of safeguards for a scenario and to establish requirements for improvement of existing safeguards or installation of new safeguards. 

The need for risk reduction measures is defined based on risk assessment usually utilizing predefined risk matrices. Risk reduction measures fall in either of the two categories “Preventative” and “Mitigative”. Preventative is a category that focuses on preventing the hazard while Mitigative is a category that focuses on minimizing the consequences of an event. 

In order to define risk reduction measures, one of the useful strategies is to employ the hierarchy of controls:

Risk Ranking:Essence of any Hazard Analysis

Recently, I was giving training on HAZOP and I got a question "Why do you say that our HAZOP is incomplete without risk ranking? We are doing the study since so long and no auditor or authorities have ever questioned us for the same." 

So this question has made me think about the situation Process Safety is facing. We know that oil & gas has developed more than other sectors including FMCG, Pharmaceutical, Chemical (Bulk & Speciality), etc. with far better standards for performing safety studies including PHAs. So, here I am writing this post to share the importance of risk ranking in any hazard analysis technique.

When is risk low enough : Risk Acceptance and ALARP

I would like to thank you all for continued interest in the blog posts. Keep reading and do like, share and comment. In this blog, we will be discussing what is the risk acceptance criteria and what is ALARP to define When is the risk low enough.

No activity is entirely free of risk in an industrial plant and hence it is imperative that safety risks are reduced to acceptable levels. The key question that remains is what level of risk is considered to be acceptable?