​To be beneficial, safety studies must have practical outcomes. OHM seeks to ensure safety studies are done pragmatically, so as to provide useful output that can be implemented. Here are some of the ways OHM has put this into practice in recent engineering projects.

Improvements in Hazard Identification
Many industries use a checklist approach to hazard identification. The check list effectively predetermines the types of hazard that will be identified. Also, it is often too long to be applied effectively and is focused on causes rather than scenarios. The result is a hazard register that is unstructured, incomplete and incompatible with later stages of hazard management.
OHM has developed a two-stage hazard identification method and used it successfully on a number of projects, resulting in:

• scope completion within each workshop as planned
• confidence that hazard identification was comprehensive
• proportionate emphasis severe events
• clearer basis for consistent risk ranking
• well-structured output without the need for a separate bow-tie workshop

Bespoke Risk Analysis for Option Studies
Risk analysis can provide useful information for engineering and operational decisions, but methods in common use are often unsuitable for this purpose. OHM has developed and deployed bespoke risk analysis methods for a number of projects, including features such as:

• scoring systems for safety and environmental risk
• cost-benefit analysis
• hazard identification including geographic information

Image © Zencus

Integration of Risk Studies into Engineering Design
Safety studies such as QRA are required components of many engineering projects, but their findings are rarely use as well as they could in order to guide the engineering process.
On two major oil & gas projects, OHM improved the interface between the engineering contractor and its specialist risk analysis consultant, so as to obtain better information from the analyses for use in the design. OHM proposed an innovative subcontract scope of work that:

• provided early outputs from the analyses, while there was still time to take them into account in the design without major rework;
• increased communication between the consultant and the engineering disciplines, including locating risk analysts alongside the engineering team at crucial stages of the project.

Closing Gaps in Hazard Identification and Analysis
Where hazard identification and analysis studies such as HAZOP/PHA and SIL are used on modification projects or vendor packages, the scope of the studies is often limited, so that significant interactions are overlooked.
OHM undertook gap analysis of such studies on a gas project and specified additional HAZOP and SIL workshops, resulting in identification of safety concerns such as corrosion, isolation and over-pressure, and helped develop solutions.

Image © Cianbro

Joined-Up Safety Cases
The primary purpose of a safety case is to demonstrate that a hazardous installation is designed and will be operated safely. However, a safety case can (and should) be used the other way round, to inform design and operation. But all too often, the various safety studies are performed in isolation, so this opportunity is missed.
In developing or supporting offshore and nuclear safety cases and COMAH safety reports, OHM has made improvements such as:

• more consistent use of safety studies in setting design accidental loads;
• optimizing active and passive fire protection;
• ensuring assumptions made in safety analyses are closed out via the actions process or in performance standards.

ALARP in Design
The early stages of a design project allow the best opportunities to implement ALARP and Inherently Safer Design (ISD) features. However, ALARP assessment is often not performed until it is too late to implement its findings without significant cost and schedule implications. These in turn may influence the assessment towards retaining the status quo.
In response to these concerns, OHM developed a simplified ALARP procedure that could be used by design disciplines to identify ALARP decisions and ISD opportunities. OHM deployed this procedure on a major engineering project and demonstrated improvements including:

• wider understanding and use of ALARP and ISD principles
• more implementation of ISD
• less need for detailed cost-benefit analysis

Image © Toyo Engineering

Decision-Making Beyond ALARP
ALARP is conventionally addressed by weighing safety improvements against costs, with a transparent bias on the side of health and safety. However, safety-related decisions are often made in the context of other values as well, such as environmental, social or community impacts. In such cases, it may not be clear that the ALARP option is the right option.
OHM investigated the ethical issues that underlie ALARP and developed an approach based on the recognition that our concern for safety is rooted in our duty to care for our neighbours, and in particular, to protect those who are unable to protect themselves. OHM demonstrated, using hypothetical examples based on real projects, that this approach can be used to reach decisions that are consistent and transparent and hence likely to be robust in the face of public challenge.

Image ©Thermoengineering