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CH 4037D Safety in Chemical Industries

The document discusses three common methods for measuring accident and loss statistics in chemical industries: (1) OSHA incidence rate, which measures injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time employees; (2) fatal accident rate (FAR), which reports fatalities per 1,000 employees over a lifetime of work; and (3) fatality rate, which reports expected deaths per person per year independent of hours worked. It also provides examples of how to calculate these rates and discusses patterns in chemical plant accidents, noting that mechanical failures due to maintenance issues and operator errors are the leading causes of losses.

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44 views12 pages

CH 4037D Safety in Chemical Industries

The document discusses three common methods for measuring accident and loss statistics in chemical industries: (1) OSHA incidence rate, which measures injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time employees; (2) fatal accident rate (FAR), which reports fatalities per 1,000 employees over a lifetime of work; and (3) fatality rate, which reports expected deaths per person per year independent of hours worked. It also provides examples of how to calculate these rates and discusses patterns in chemical plant accidents, noting that mechanical failures due to maintenance issues and operator errors are the leading causes of losses.

Uploaded by

faisal dilshad
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CH 4037D

SAFETY IN CHEMICAL
INDUSTRIES

Lecture 3
Accident and Loss Statistics

•important measures of the effectiveness of safety programs.


•These statistics are valuable for determining whether a process is safe
or whether a safety procedure is working effectively
• Many statistical methods are available to characterize accident and loss
performance
• The three systems considered here are:
OSHA incidence rate,
fatal accident rate (FAR)
fatality rate, or deaths per person per year
• All three methods report the number of accidents and/or fatalities for a
fixed number of workers during a specified period
1) OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of
the United States government.
• OSHA is responsible for ensuring that workers are provided
with a safe working environment
• The OSHA incidence rate is based on cases per 100 worker
years.
• A worker year is assumed to contain 2000 hours (50 work
weeks/year X 40 hours/week).
• The OSHA incidence rate is therefore based on 200,000 hours
of worker exposure to a hazard.
• The OSHA incidence rate is calculated from the number of
occupational injuries and illnesses and the total number of
employee hours worked during the applicable period.
• Incident rate : Number of occupational injuries and/or illnesses
or lost workdays per 100 full-time employees
Lost workdays: Number of days (consecutive or not) after but not including
the day of injury or illness during which the employee would have worked but
could not do so, that is, during which the employee could not perform all or
any part of his or her normal assignment during all or any part of the
workday or shift because of the occupational injury or illness
• The OSHA incidence rate provides information on all types of work-
related injuries and illnesses, including fatalities.
• This provides a better representation of worker accidents than
systems based on fatalities alone.
• For instance, a plant might experience many small accidents with
resulting injuries but no fatalities.
• On the other hand, fatality data cannot be extracted from the
OSHA incidence rate without additional information
2) The Fatal Accident Rate (FAR) is used mostly by the British
chemical industry.
• The FAR reports the number of fatalities based on 1000 employees
working their entire lifetime.
• The employees are assumed to work a total of 50 years.
• FAR is based on 108 working hours.
3) Fatality rate or deaths per person per year.

• This system is independent of the number of hours actually


worked and reports only the number of fatalities expected
per person per year.
• This approach is useful for performing calculations on the
general population, where the number of exposed hours is
poorly defined.
• The applicable equation is
1. A process has a reported FAR of 2. If an employee works a
standard 8-hr shift 300 days per year, compute the deaths
per person per year.
2. If twice as many people used motorcycles for the same
average amount of time each, what will happen to
a) the OSHA incidence rate,
b) the FAR,
c) the fatality rate, and
d) the total number of fatalities?
The Nature of the Accident Process

• Chemical plant accidents follow typical patterns. It is important to


study these patterns in order to anticipate the types of accidents that
will occur.
• Economic loss is consistently high for accidents involving explosions.
• The most damaging type of explosion is an unconfined vapor cloud
explosion, where a large cloud of volatile and flammable vapor is released
and dispersed throughout the plant site followed by ignition and explosion
of the cloud.

• Toxic release typically results in little damage to capital equipment.


Personnel injuries, employee losses, legal compensation, and cleanup
liabilities can be significant
• By far the largest cause of loss in a chemical plant is due to
mechanical failure.
• Failures of this type are usually due to a problem with maintenance.
• Pumps, valves, and control equipment will fail if not properly
maintained.
• The second largest cause is operator error (includes human errors made
on-site that lead directly to the loss.).
• For example, valves are not opened or closed in the proper sequence
or reactants are not charged to a reactor in the correct order.
• Process upsets caused by, for example, power or cooling water
failures account for 11 % of the losses.
• Human error is frequently used to describe a cause of losses.
• Almost all accidents, except those caused by natural hazards, can be
attributed to human error.
• For instance, mechanical failures could all be due to human error as
a result of improper maintenance or inspection.

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