Risk And Safety

I had been  away from writing blog posts for last 3 months or so…mainly because of my travel to S. Korea. I have also been kept busy working on adding advanced features to Risk and Safety site. I will unveil them in the coming few months.

I hope to get back to writing blog posts regularly.For the moment, I would like to direct your attention to one of the earliest blog post I wrote – Safety Forecast for the 21st Century. I concluded that “Every decade in the 21st century, the process industry will witness an incident that will result in at least 10 fatalities.” In particular, I want you to notice John Westover’s (http://www.process-engineers.com/) comment at the bottom of the post. 

We are far from zero incident plants!

John’s comment reprinted here:

Excellent work Dr Saraf.

I must disagree on one feature of your curve. I think there will be one super-incident in the 21st century. This will cause more deaths than Bhopal, giving your curve more of an “inverted S” shape.

My basis for predicting the super-incident? Mostly “gut-instinct” but consider …
+ Larger facilities being built in countries with severe poverty.
+ People living in poverty moving near these large facilities.
+ Lack of enforcement of government standards in these countries.
+ The need for profit – this drives issues like reducing training budgets and reducing maintenance budgets. We have difficulty catching up.
+ It adds up to the potential for an incident with a very large concentration of people can be more catastrophic than Bhopal.

I agree, systems are in place (and will be developed and enhanced with time) but one failure to comply creates the opportunity.

In summary Dr Saraf, good work, good article, and thank you for stimulating thought.