We recently completed a Re-HAZOP study of one of our main IDEA design clients production facilities in south west England. It had been a long time since a full assessment of the facility had been carried out, and the management recognised the need to re-align with current standards after several projects implementing significant changes.
Although each of the major projects themselves were risk assessed, a holistic view of the whole facility to give a consistent approach in line with current standards had never been carried out.
Over the course of four days we had some fantastic engagement with the engineering and operations teams to uncover lots of ways the operation of the site has deviated from the original design intent.
Some of the key findings:
🔎Often the operations team doesn’t get a chance to think about the whole process, and where there are inconsistencies that need to be understood.
🔎There had been new product lines introduced, changing the parameters for materials handled, but these were never fully documented.
🔎There are operations with a high reliance on manual activities are carried out, but the operating procedures haven’t been kept up to date – therefore they don’t reveal the possible maloperations.
🔎It provides a perfect opportunity for the team to review all the site hazards and possible domino effects, in light of any recent incidents or near misses.
All in all this turned out to be a really worthwhile activity, hopefully lowering the risk of process safety incidents across the facility.
