Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
Uncertainty is all around us, never more so than today. Whether it concerns a global pandemic, the economy, or your finances, health, and relationships, much of what lies ahead in life remains uncertain.
Nonetheless, life continues. You still must earn a living, take care of the family, house, and car, and walk the dog. All under these new clouds of stress and uncertainty.
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In December 2005, fire and explosion at Buncefield oil storage depot injured 40 people. Overfilling of a fuel storage tank (Tank 912) led to release of unleaded gasoline (petrol) which formed a cloud of flammable vapor that subsequently ignited.
[Read more…]Andy Benoit once said, “Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
This statement is so true when corporate leaders and managers tend to over-complicate processes or over-engineer systems in organizations. Designing and implementing your organization’s enterprise-wide risk management system is no exception.
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The U.S. Government has extended the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) to 2014. TRIA is intended to support insurance companies in case the claims from a terror incident go above a certain threshold.
What is interesting are the exclusions used by the government for this reinsurance.
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Are project risks round? Curved objects can be less controllable than planar ones as they pitch, roll and yaw; and the tighter their curves the more difficult control becomes. Even a truly planar surface is, geometrically, a curve but with an infinite radius. The Earth’s horizon, that imaginary plane perpendicular to its radius is considered by some to be ‘flat’ but in reality it’s a sphere so we can never see over the horizon. But what has this got to do with project risk?
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The reactivity of a chemical or a mixture is normally assessed by thermal analysis. Thus the thermal analysis data forms the basis of risk mitigation decisions. What does the thermal analysis data tell us and how to base risk mitigation decisions? How to tell which compositions are more reactive and should be scrutinized closely?
Missing from the current body of knowledge is a simple classification to help rank compositions in order of their reactivity.
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Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is becoming an important topic and activity worldwide. This is in part because of COVID 19. COVID 19 focused the public’s attention on health risks. As the world comes out of the pandemic crisis, the focus, particularly in government, will be on other risks. Already, in the United States, cities which defunded the police, are reallocating money back due to rising crime. However, because of the political atmosphere and retirement of senior officers, cities are having trouble recruiting enough people to fill the vacated ranks. Adding to this problem are the consequences of riots and work from home. In many urban areas, the result has been a hollowing out of the urban core.
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The major cause of natural gas pipeline rupture is not corrosion or material defect but external damage.
External damage is the damage to pipeline during digging, pilling, ground work, etc. by heavy equipment such as anchor, bulldozer, excavator, or plough. Moreover typically the external damage is from third party construction activities and not the pipeline owner-operator.
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We are in an interesting time in history, when transformative digital disruptions have their foot on the gas and are accelerating at exponential rates. Every industry is facing disruption in a multitude of ways, and it is now up to business leaders and their organizations to implement my Anticipatory Organization® Model and understand and identify the future certainties of Hard Trends and how to leverage them to become the disruptor before someone else does.
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According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there were 11 deaths every 100,000 workers in India in 2005. This number was two in the US and 0.01 in Japan. What is scary is that the number of fatalities may be significantly underestimated because of absence of a formal accident tracking system. I suspect the situation in other developing nations isn’t significantly different.
Why is the fatality rate in the industrial sectors in the developing nations so high?
[Read more…]Humble, personal, professional, expert or even uninformed; opinions are just opinions when the facts aren’t fully known or understood. Opinionators are merely stating their belief as to the what, why, when, where and the how something has happened and who was responsible, who is culpable and who has to do something. This belief is believed, at least by them, and, for the most part, they expect other people to believe it as well.
Agreement brings harmony, collaboration and progress while disagreement brings confrontation, debate and procrastination while each party attempts to convert the other to their oftentimes sanctimonious viewpoint.
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Evaluation of reactive chemical hazards can range from simple paper-based calculations to highly complex testing and modeling. This post is aimed at helping you formulate a systematic strategy for evaluating reactive chemical hazards in your facility. I will divide the various approaches in three tiers – simple to complex.
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How does Earn Value Management (EVM) reduce project risk? To answer this question, you have to understand what EVM is.
EVM is the tool used to measure progress against the PMB. (Performance Measurement Plan). EVM identifies poorly performing WP (Work Packages) and problem trends early in the project allowing maximum time to identify the root cause of the problem and identify an action plan to fix the problem.
[Read more…]OSHA inspected 42 refineries between June 2007 – February 2009. Below is a summary of violations for 30 refineries. A bit of history.
[Read more…]There are numerous papers and documents on the internet regarding a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The question is how do you create one for a new project. This paper explains how.
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