Why is process safety important in wastewater plant design and operations?
Article
Anaerobic Digestion
When running any site we all know keeping our sites and staff safe is crucial. Day to day management of health and safety for workers on site is often referred to as occupational health and safety, but when working in higher-risk industries such as chemical, pharmaceutical, and oil and gas, it is especially important. With the presence of hazards such as toxic chemicals and flammable gases, process safety is hugely important in wastewater treatment plant design and operation.
Process safety deals with preventing and mitigating large incidents such as pollution, explosion or fire. It’s goal is to prevent catastrophic failures that can cause harm to the community, the environment, and the facility. Effective process safety management requires a belt and braces approach that includes detailed risk assessment, robust engineering controls, good safety management systems, human factors understanding, and well drilled emergency planning and response. Even a seemingly minor incident could have serious consequences.
Process safety is critical in wastewater management as there are many potential hazards associated with handling, treating, and disposing of wastewater. These hazards pose a significant risk to human health and the environment. Incidents from a failure in the process can result in severe consequences, such as injuries, fatalities, legal action, fines, and reputational damage.
Incorporating process safety during the design stage of every project, or where a process change is required is crucial. It not only protects the site, community and environment, it saves time and investment by reducing the need to make upgrades or changes later on.
For companies that fall outside high risk industries who manage their own waste treatment and anaerobic digestion facilities, the discipline of process safety may not be as well known, so engaging a specialist like Alpheus can help your organisation understand and implement measures to protect against unforeseen events.
Occupational safety – focuses on protecting the safety, health and welfare of people at work (sometimes called ‘personal safety’). Process safety – focuses on major accident hazards associated with releases of energy, chemicals, and other hazardous substances.
Characteristics typically associated with occupational safety are higher frequency, with a localised impact and likely to result from a single root cause . The consequences of incidents are likely to be more predictable and controls can be implemented to help mitigate or remove these.
Those associated with process safety incidents are the opposite. they are rare, have a much wider impact, and could be attributed to multiple causes from active or latent failures and the integrity of the hazard may not be so obvious (such as corrosion inside a pipeline). Likewise, the consequences of an incident cannot be as easily foreseen.
Occupations health and safety is focused on preventing and mitigating incidents of personal safety, concentrating on how to operate safely within that environment.
Using process safety while designing or upgrading a plant, ensures that buildings and processes are built with inherent safety in mind, which not only aims to mitigate obvious risks at a site level, it aims to prevent and mitigate unlikely and potentially disastrous events occurring that would pose risk to life, the community and the environment.
Compared to the day to day running costs of operational safety, the scale of investment in process safety can seem very high, and it is not limited to the cost of training, there is the cost of implementing additional measures and processes. That being said, when you look at what it protects against, the cost of not investing could be much higher in terms of lost productivity, damage to reputation and more.
Fortunately Alpheus can help bring process safety management to your wastewater treatment facility without the high costs associated with establishing it yourself, particularly if it is not already adopted on site. It’s one of the reasons some of the largest private and public UK sites put their trust in us!
Process safety is a crucial discipline within the business, so we’ve ensured key members of our Engineering and Operations teams are fully trained in Process Safety Management. This intense week long course which incorporates an exam and final assessment, ensures our team is able to implement projects and changes to the highest safety standard and in a way that also protects the wider community and environment from harm.
Of course, it is not just about training, it is about experience. In addition to over 30 years manging safe and compliant operations across the UK, including large pharmaceutical and Anaerobic Digestion plants, we also only benefit from processes and insight from the Anglian Water Group.
To ensure Process safety is integral we have invested significant time and resource into processes for management of change, implemented Bow Tie assessments to define risks and define measures to mitigate them, as well as implement process safety performance indicators, to name just a few.
As we write this in April 2023, another 5 members of the team have completed the industry Leading IOSH course.
Matt McGinty, Project Manager shared: "The trainer started the course sharing the phrase 'You don’t know what you don’t know' and advised us it would become more relevant as the course progressed. Everyone will have had their own interpretation, but this is mine. Chances are, you don’t know everything but being more self-aware about this helps you to evaluate situations to make better informed decisions. It makes you stop and think and ask yourself; what is it that I don’t know or understand that I need further guidance on before a decision can be made? With this understanding and talking through multiple examples, it gave me the confidence to stop a planned activity, evaluate what I knew and didn’t know, re-evaluate the method with assistance from subject matter experts, and complete the task in the safest way possible."
Bill, Maintenance Leader commented: “It has made me more aware that Process Safety is not just about the technical side of equipment used in a process, but incorporates many factors such as environment, raw materials, control systems, ergonomics, administration etc.”
Kostas, Design Engineer said: “The process safety course empowered me with a new way of thinking and introduced to me new tools that I can use to reduce the risks and mitigate hazards during the design of a process. This way I can help make everyone’s day safer.”
