Safetyology 101

Written by pdcsafety on August 18th, 2008

Safety At Work - Categorizing Hazard Identification

By Gary Marsh

Safety at Work depends on you and your employees ability to identify hazards. Without it, you could see many minor to even major incidents occur. Let's go over categorizing hazard management in your safety at work program as well as cover identifying hazards. This article will finish up by listing a set of definitions that should be known throughout your organization.

Safety at Work Hazards management can be categorized into two areas:

1. The management of hazards associated with the overall design and operation of a process. An example of this type of hazard management would be the formal Hazard Identification (HAZID) for the operation or Formal Safety At Work Assessment contained within a typical Safety Case.

2. The management of hazards associated with discrete sub activities such as maintenance. An example of this type of hazard management would be a Job Safety Analysis or Task Based Risk Assessment conducted prior to a significant maintenance task on a facility.

The basic hazard management steps remain the same in both cases and are:

1. Systematic identification of hazards;
2. Assessment of the risk arising from the hazards;
3. Implementation of suitable hazard controls; and
4. Preparedness for recovery in the event of a loss control.

SAFETY AT WORK HAZARD IDENTIFICATION

The hazard identification methods which follow are mainly concerned with identifying the "initiating events" which could lead either directly, or in conjunction with other failed systems, to a major hazardous event being realized. Initiating events could include hardware failure, control system failure, human error, extreme conditions, etc. Identification of initiating events will usually "flush out" the hazard present.

Methods include:

Use of existing standards, codes or procedures;
 Performance of Hazard Identification and assessment (HAZID) studies;
 Performance of Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) studies;
 Review of past hazard loss and incident reports;
 Use of checklists;
 Reliance on experience (competence); and
 Brainstorming (usually identifies risk issues for follow-up).

SAFETY AT WORK DEFINITIONS:

Hazard
A physical situation which may result in harm, including death or injury to people or damage to property.

Hazardous Event
An accidental event in which a hazard causes harm to people, or damage to property or the environment.

Hazard Identification
Identification of the nature of all hazards within the safety at work program .

Hazard Register
Documents all the hazards identified at a facility or associated activities and ranks them according to the severity of their consequences should they be involved in a hazardous event.

Hazard / Risk Control
Risk reduction measures that are undertaken by Seadrill to ensure the risk is reduced to as low as is reasonably practicable (ALARP).

Risk
Risk is the product of the likelihood of a hazardous event occurring and the severity of its consequences.

Risk Acceptance Criteria
A qualitative or quantitative value selected by the operator or imposed by the regulator that the assessed risk for a particular activity or facility shall not exceed.

Risk Management
The ongoing management process of identifying hazards, assessing risk and the reduction of that risk to as low as reasonably practicable.

Safety at work really requires you to understand everything listed within this article. As many safety at work programs in all industry segments could stand a little improvement, maybe a short article such as the one your reading is just enough to save a life or prevent a minor incident from occurring. And all it took was a minute or two to read up on categorizing safety at work hazards management, categorizing hazards and finally, covering a few critical definitions.