Posted By Jay Joshi
I do not think COMAH was the result of Piper Alpha. Piper Alpha gave us the Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 1992 [that have been superseded by The Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 2005]

COMAH "followed" CIMAH. CIMAH was the result of some catastrophic chemical industry accidents worldwide, Bhopal & Seveso being the principal ones. In fact, the EU directive that both CIMAH and COMAH resulted from are often referred to as the Seveso I and Seveso II Directives

The transcripts and the entire web-cast of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor can be accessed via the CSB website.

It appears that unless the extremely powerful industry lobby manages to dilute and sidetrack the recommendations from the CSB and other reports, the downstream oil & gas industry in particular and chemical industry in general will get more enforcement from OSHA.

This can only happen if OSHA is adequately resourced and funded.

Coming from a Petrochemical Industry background I have taken the trouble of listening to the entire testimony that is approximately 2 hour hearing.

Although it was the BP Texas refinery explosion that has resulted in all this, the testimony to the committee by the CSB Chair & CEO casts a question mark in the manner in which the entire industry is regulated and the ineffectiveness of the regulator.

In my personal view, the API (American Petroleum Institute) has also been brought to task and its role questioned.


We should be extremely proud that our Health and Safety "regulatory system" is tripartriate and has input from all 3 parties. Not only that, but the objective nature of our regulatory approach and 3 tier system of regulations, ACoPs and guidance seems to be superior to the OSHA system of the OSHA Act and "Standards" etc.

The CSB chair & CEO repeated in her testimony the work carried out by the HSE in identifying and managing process safety leading indicators in the aftermath of the BP Grangemouth Fire/explosion


I realise that a lot of us do not like what is coming out of EU , e.g. Working Time Regulations! Operator fatigue has been the cited as one of the reasons--yes, in the BP Texas refinery blast case, some of them had been working more than thirty 12 hour shifts without a rest day.

If one closely follows what has been happening to OSHA, it's funding and effectiveness has been reduced as a result of lobbying by the USA Employers.

I do not wish to publicly comment on the "politics" and its effect on OSHA due to the 2 main political parties in USA, but there was an " Ergonomics Rule" that almost had become a standard, that was "repealed" by a succeeding administration.

It would almost seem that what USA needs is not the system of prescriptive "regulations", but a system somewhat akin to ours High Hazard Industry has to demonstrate "ALARP" etc (so that account of technological and engineering advances can be taken into account by the regulator), submit safety cases/reports and justify safety case.Unfortunately, does not appear to have been identified in the various reports or the testimony so far.

Posted By Ian Waldram
For all UK sectors where a safety case is required (onshore, offshore, railways, pipelines, nuclear to an extent - but with a more prescriptive history) the HSE Inspectors spend much of their effort: a) assessing the Safety Case/Report compiled by the duty holder to confirm that it covers all the required elements (lots of detailed guidance on the HSE website about what this assessment covers - in that sense, yes they are checking against a fairly prescriptive template, but one that defines contents, not wording); b) once the document is "accepted" by HSE, i.e. they agree that it does provide assurance that the duty holder has identified all the major hazards and has described robust systems to manage them, then they target subsequent onsite inspections to confirm that what the document says is really in place. Again, they are checking against a prescriptive document, but one compiled by the duty holder, not the regulator, and it varies for each location or organisation.

Other inspections may cover specific themes identified by HSE as potential weaknesses for the whole sector, and they look in depth at whether all the elements to manage that hazard are in place and robust. For example for the offshore sector one current HSE theme is lifting and handling of loads, as that is an area where most fatalities occur, another is equipment integrity as small hydrocarbon leaks may be a pre-cursor the big ones. Clearly, you need pretty competent inspectors both to identify key priorities and then to create an added-value inspection template for their colleagues to use consistently - it has to be more that a tick-box approach to identify whether the systems are suitably robust, rahter than just confirming something is in place

All rather different to the typical OSHA approach, which CSB has (in my opinion) rightly identified as weak in respect of process hazards - there is some good Process Hazards legislation, but an under-resourced inspectorate, and a consequent focus on things that are easier to measure, like injuries and heights of handrails. If the Inspectorate focus on these, so will duty holders.

Posted By Jay Joshi
The final CSB report (337 pages!) is now available on the CSB website.

http://www.csb.gov/compl...l%20Report%203.23.07.pdf


Although there are no direct recommendations to implement or even look at what HSE does, the UK HSE and our "system" has been mentioned several times in a positive note, including the HSE guidance for Directors and the Turnbull requirements.