IChemE launches interactive safety case studies

ICHEME has launched two interactive safety case studies – Chemical Plant and Underground Pipeline. The launch was announced by Trish Kerin, IChemE Safety Centre Director, at Hazards 29, Europe’s largest annual process safety conference, held in Birmingham, UK.

The conference, held on 22–24 May, started with pre-conference workshops and a welcome reception, which included a talk from Mike Bell, Disney’s Worldwide Safety and Health Manager.

Chemical Plant and Underground Pipeline are training resources that put process safety professionals in the drivers seat. Through the animated video footage, users can experience an incident without prior knowledge of the outcome and are put through several scenarios where they are asked to make crucial safety decisions. Users can learn how their decisions impact the outcome of the incident.

Chemical Plant highlights the conflicting pressures of budget and production versus safety, showing the challenges of determining which option is inherently safer.

Underground Pipeline highlights how making assumptions in asset management can impact the overall risk profile and safety performance.

According to Kerin, the feedback since the case studies launched in 2016 has been “overwhelmingly positive” and “there has been strong interest in a continued variety of examples”. Kerin added that IChemE is also planning to reveal a new case study, Laboratory Experiment.

Kerin said: “When we review the findings of an incident, we do it with the knowledge of what caused it and, as humans, it can be easy to rationalise why the incident wouldn’t happen to us because we would make different decisions. These case studies challenge the conventional way in which we learn from incidents and go through the decision-making process, without the actual consequences of an incident.”

Interested parties can watch case study sample footage, or purchase a case study online.