January brings our first Quarterly Theme for 2024: Preventing Major Accidents. A good understanding of Major Accident Hazards (MAHs) is key to maintaining safe operations. How these hazards are managed can help prevent major incidents and ultimately save lives.
A MAH is a source of danger that has the potential to cause a major incident, whether that involves multiple fatalities and/or significant damage to plant, equipment, or the environment.
Resources included on the page will help you:
- Appreciate how your routine activities interact with barriers which keep us safe,
- Be better equipped to recognise when a barrier has been impaired and know what action to take to report it,
- Understand how your decisions affect the risk of major accidents.
The Process Safety Working Group at Safer Together has developed a range of resources that address the prevention of major incidents, including Process Safety Awareness Campaign materials that include the educational video, 'Maintain It', designed to help improve conversations with your team about process safety.
Our Learning Event Bulletins (LEBs) are a tool to assist with learning from unwanted events and/or threats to reduce the occurrence of High Potential Incidents. They are designed to encourage companies to approach unwanted events with a positive learning mindset, to investigate, report and disseminate the lessons learned from these events as High Value Learning Events.
In this LEB, Maintaining Process Equipment – Loss of Containment, a maintenance worker was instructed to reduce bolt a flange join on a heat exchanger shell. This was in the work scope and documented in the work permit.
The worker set up their work area and then commenced work on the wrong heat exchanger shell, which was live.
An operator noticed that work was proceeding on the wrong exchanger shell and instructed the worker to stop.
Follow the link for the Learning Event Bulletin and the Toolbox from this incident.
Go to the Preventing Major Accidents page and find the collated resources and collateral you need to focus on this theme in your company, and everything you need to run a quarterly safety campaign, including Learning Event Bulletins, Safety Alerts and Toolboxes.
Access Quarter 1 materials from our international collaboration partners Step Change in Safety (UK) and Always Safe (Norway).
For more information, email: [email protected].