Learn and Leverage What Others Know! …about your facility, chemicals, equipment, threats and impacts.
Risk Alive (riskalive.com) is dedicated to the 1000’s of people on the frontlines, operators and managers of plants, working with hazards and dangerous chemicals.
These individuals collect the truths about risk in their facility during risk assessments. Much like defensive driving, when these truths are made known and understood, accidents can be avoided.
Risk Alive turns learnings from others and combines them with your learnings creating knowledge and understanding of what is critical or missing while operating a plant. It is an important leading metric in Process Safety making the goal, “as safe as one can be”, possible..
You are not alone
You are not the only one facing hazards and trying to figure out:
- “What is really critical?”
- “Am I safe enough?
- “What are the priority recommendations from my recent risk assessment (e.g. HAZOP, PHA, what-if…etc.) considering costs?”
For years you have been asked to budget for, manage, and conduct risk assessments without an accurate and timely way to measure how safe you are today, or how safe you are compared to others. You may also have worried, “have we considered all threats and impacts?” or “did we miss one?” or “does it matter?”
For years you have struggled with prioritizing expensive recommendations and for years industry has been trying to build a culture to help all of us reduce the likelihood and impact of fires, explosions and spills. In more recent years, the fallout from unsafe days has also attracted growing media coverage. What can we do in the meantime?
Oceania’s article “Duped into Drilling”, which describes the perspectives held by owners, politicians and public organizations, is a reminder that all of us come with our own perspective, especially when under pressure to do something different or make others feel safe. However, it is the ones who are directly impacted (frontline workers and managers) that need to be aware of what is critical, so no matter what their situation, they can be the stewards of safe operating facilities and be “as safe as one can be”.
Take advantage. . .it’s okay
Most of us cannot control who we work for, or what external forces will impact us. All we can do is take advantage of what we know today. If something surprises us tomorrow which has already happened to others, the conclusion is: We didn’t take advantage, or leverage what the world already knows. We just didn’t know. Yet others such as the media, regulators and the public don’t care that you didn’t know. Here’s the thing, the truth about today is that we have access to a lot of data. With this data we can:
- Help those individuals who are stewards for keeping us safe
- Reduce the likelihood of fires, explosions and spills
- Keep the media fallout from impacting our industry share price
For example, if each individual in a facility could understand what is critical in their facility (e.g. threats and impacts for each chemical type, each piece of equipment, each process type, and every hazardous scenario) by leveraging global data and learnings, we would then be taking advantage of what the world already knows. No need to wait for unsafe days to learn about change when we can change now by taking advantage of what others already know (learnings) about our same situation.
Consider the risk data collected in the Chemical Industry by every individual site as required by regulations or industry best practice. There is a lot of risk data just sitting on the shelf that could be squeezed by everyone to the overall benefit of being “safe as one can be”. The risk data for each site has been accumulating on the shelf for years and continues to accumulate without being squeezed by others for valuable learnings.
Now, the stewards of safe operating facilities have an opportunity to learn from others with a new Report Card service (riskalive.com). It requires very little effort. Just submit data on a website then receive a Risk Alive report on your risk data including what is critical, and what is learned from others with similar chemicals, equipment, and processes.
Takeaway
If you don’t agree that one needs to understand the learnings of others, and how they see hazardous scenarios …to be “as safe as one can be”… then please ignore this message about how to measure your risk level, and learn what others also know about your chemicals, equipment, threats and impacts.
Remember. . .
A five (5) day risk Assessment has 1500 learning scenarios
30,000 Chemical Plants in the US with 1500 learnings each generate 45 million “on the shelf” learnings. . .why not try to learn from these?
Get your free report card: riskalive.com
