Meeting Safety Standards in Industrial Plants-what are the costs?

Running an industrial manufacturing plant in these days is tough.  First, you have to meet all the production and cost targets, whereas you are not allowed to hire more hands (due to the slowing economy), or to have any safety violations or incidents, nor any environmental issues. With shrinking budgets and an equally shrinking manpower, do you find it challenging to meet safety standards and norms and other safety procedures, that are applicable to your plants?

The buzz is yes, most plant managers do find it tough and the reason is not just that the norms are becoming more tougher and stringent by the day-it is also because there are so many of them-just count how many safety procedures a typical industrial plant has to follow and adhere to. Simply put, a typical manufacturing plant is subject to many many more safety norms & safety procedures than your run- of-the- mill -mall or office or other commercial building.  And I have not even started discussing chemical or other hazardous material processing plants. Even a small discrete parts manufacturing plant, has to meet several of these safety regulations. To start with, the plants have to conform to basic work safety, conduct hse safety training (it’s not just displaying a couple of safety training videos to the workmen with some safety posters thrown in for good measure-but carry out practical safety training like firefighting and emergency preparedness training), do safety audits and assessments and so on. Then there are the environmental norms, even for something like disposing waste lubricants and oils. Add on the standards for adequate industrial grade lighting and ventilation, safe distances, speed limits, testing of various equipment like hoses and hoists, machine safety and interlocks and so on. These are to meet the safety norms of the establishment/equipment.

Then there are the human factors safety norms. In addition to PPE and HSE norms, the increasing age of the average industrial worker means that the plants now have to do more often a combination of both health & safety training programs like back safety and preventing workplace injury, due to poor postures and movements.

And if you run a chemical manufacturing plant, then you have to additionally meet safety norms for storage of hazardous materials, explosive atmospheres, static discharges, safety alarms and interlock checking, fire and gas monitoring, boiler safety, burner management systems, emergency shutdown systems and and…….

I wonder if anybody has any figures of the total costs incurred on these. It’s not just the direct dollars and cents spent on safety videos and posters, but also the indirect costs for having special equipment and installations. It would be interesting to know what these percentages are and what these figures are for factories around the world (say in China).

I am of course not at all saying, that these norms should not be met, in fact these SHOULD be strictly adhered to, to protect workers, other stakeholders and society at large, BUT there should also be enough publicity given by the industrial plants themselves, to all this money being spent for a good cause.  At present, the image in the Mainstream media is somewhat rather different; the MSM thinks that these plants are rusty uncompetitive dinosaurs (being no doubt fed by the Wall Street bean counters-we all know how they used to mislead everybody) ; which is not the case at all. If a tycoon donating a few millions to a college can make the headlines, why not an industrial plant spending millions on meeting safety standards?

The figures would bear it out for sure and show these plants in good light to the average Joe. After all a strong economy is built by strong manufacturing plants too, not just MBAs trading pieces of paper (or bits and bytes) in their surreal worlds : )

As usual, comments are welcome!

Are integrated SIS/DCS systems better than standalone SIS DCS systems?

Lately, there have been many launches of new “integrated” control systems, that have both DCS and SIS systems in the same package. For those of you are not familiar with these terms, an SIS is short for “Safety Instrumented System“, which is a special kind of control system that is used for the safety critical parts of process plants, turbomachinery, boilers and so on. Emergency Shutdown Systems (ESD for short), can be considered a subset of the SIS category of control systems.

On the other hand DCS (Distributed Control Systems) are those control systems that are used for normal control and monitoring operations of process plants, oil refineries, oil & gas production platforms, power plants and so on. The DCS is the main system that measures, monitors and controls various process parameters like flow, temperature, pressure and so on.

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In the view of the standards bodies (like IEC and ISA), these two systems have to be separate, as the safety systems have to be dedicated to only the safety critical parts of the plant and the garden-variety DCS cannot be said to be robust, fail-safe and sure to operate the safety critical instruments at all times. This distinction between the DCS and SIS, led to separate markets for both types of systems with separate suppliers for both, initially. Thus suppliers like HIMA, ICS Triplex, Triconex, PILZ and so on were the suppliers of these Safety Instrumented Systems, whereas the DCS market belonged to the companies like Emerson, ABB, Honeywell, Yokogawa and so on.

This obviously, meant that now, if a plant had safety critical instruments and controls, it necessarily required a separate SIS, the DCS would not do. This now,  one control room had two control systems, totally different as chalk and cheese. The SIS had  separate power supplies, panels, monitoring stations, separate programming software and of course totally separate hardware. The same Instrument engineer who got allotted to the process plant, had to be adept at both systems simultaneously to do his job well. Plant modifications and changes were a nightmare as any change had to be implemented in both systems.

Making the two systems communicate to each other also proved not so simple.

Hence, all these instrument engineers started wishing for a new deal, whereby both systems could talk to each other seamlessly (even while remaining separate to conform to the standards) and what if they could share a common engineering /programming platform as well?  That would be great!

The DCS vendors sensed this fervent desire and many of them came out with “integrated” systems, where the DCS and SIS controllers are different but part of the same overall system.  Some examples are Emerson’s Delta V with SIS and Siemens Safety Integrated.

What does this mean for the traditional SIS-only vendors like HIMA and Triconex? Have users started switching over to the new integrated systems? Or is it a passing fad? As a system designer, safety manager, instrument engineer or plant manager, which option is better? Separate or integrated? Your comments on this will be welcome.

Sunrise propane explosion-could a little investment in good engineering and safety systems have averted it?

In Aug 2008, there was an explosion in a propane storage facility, located in the midst of a residential area in Toronto. There were two fatalities including that of a firefighter. The explosion was so huge it was very frightening and the subsequent fire was deadlier.

Here’s a link to the video on YouTube

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=XCsNcwpYjUs

About 12,500 people had to be evacuated and the damage to property was extensive. The facility is owned by Sunrise Propane Energy Group, who are now facing a class action suit against them after the incident. An investigation into the incident has thrown up some probable causes, one of which is a truck-to-truck transfer of propane, which is not recommended for safety reasons.

Additionally a review of all existing propane installations in Ontario was ordered by the local government and the report is now released. It has reportedly about 40 safety and training recommendations.  One of the recommendations is to review hazard distances and make that information available to the public at large. Unfortunately, most of the “public” everywhere (not just in Ontario) is not at all well informed about hazardous materials, their properties, safe distances and  how to handle related emergencies.

(In fact, the general lack of easily available information related to hazardous area classification was one of the reasons why Abhisam Software, decided to come out with a download version of its popular hazardous area instrumentation training course at an affordable $99 price).

Well, coming back to the propane incident, it just shows how seriously all companies need to take storage and handling of hazardous materials, in case they wish to avoid fatalities, losses to property and open ended class action suits having potential liabilities of millions of dollars.  A little investment in good engineering practices, safe designs with adequate safety margins, investment in training of operators and maintenance staff would have gone a long way in avoiding these huge costs later on. I believe there are a lot of reasons for the general deterioration of these standards in many companies, which include the following

• the mad cost-cutting of the last decade under the influence of the wall street gang (whom we now know to be thieves in disguise)
• the blind acceptance of these practices, by all and sundry in the management (along with some  fat, it cut out a lot of the muscle and brain too)
• the overwhelming desire to match the “China price”
• the “profits before safety” philosophy-in fact the “profits before anything” philosophy
• the demolition of in-house engineering talent under the influence of again the same wall street  ( they were overheads you see, not engineers with brains)

But I will stop my rant now and allow you to mull over all this.

BTW I wonder if the bean counters at these companies have understood all this in the right context (the importance of engineering, training and safety).

Comments are always welcome.