US safety panel cool to pre-start inspection plan

01 October 2007 22:26  [Source: ICIS news]

BALTIMORE, Maryland (ICIS news)--The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) has no immediate plans to press for a new congressional mandate for pre-start inspection of chemical plants, a board member said on Monday.

 

CSB board member Gary Visscher said the principal US federal chemical safety panel “has no plans at the moment” to pursue a recommendation from former board chairwoman Carolyn Merritt that chemical plants should be subject to government safety inspections prior to start-up or re-start.

 

Merritt urged Congress in July this year to consider a new regulatory programme for the US chemicals industry designed to give greater preventive protection against catastrophic plant explosions, such as the March 2005 disaster that killed 15 workers and injured 180 others at the BP refinery at Texas City, Texas.

 

In testimony delivered just before she retired as CSB chairwoman, Merritt said a safety and security approach used by other countries, called the “safety case”, could sharply improve US process industry safety. 

 

Under that regulatory approach, Merritt said, “chemical facilities must receive permission to operate in advance, based on a demonstration of safety competence to government authorities”.

 

“While such systems may require more effort to implement, they have the advantage of being preventive in nature,” she said.

 

Merritt left the safety board on 2 August.

 

Visscher, speaking at the opening session of a three-day chemical industry safety and security conference, was asked if the board plans to pursue Merritt’s call for a pre-operations safety inspection programme.

 

“There are no plans to look at that at the moment,” Visscher said, adding that “on the whole, there have been tremendous strides in chemical plant safety.”

 

However, Visscher told industry safety executives that in the wake of the BP Texas City disaster, “there is an urgent need for a better set of safety indicators” across the US chemicals sector. 

 

He said the CSB investigation of that high-fatalities accident found that BP erroneously relied on reduced personal injury statistics at the Texas City site as an indicator of plant safety, but that measure failed to identify continuing problems in the facility’s process safety.

 

Visscher said that while the number of fatal US chemical plant accidents has declined since 1994, “chemical plant accidents still occur, and there are a variety of reasons that make those accidents less acceptable”.

 

Nevertheless, he indicated that the Chemical Safety Board does not plan to pursue an “inspection first” policy with Congress.  “There is no system in place that would facilitate start-up reviews” at chemical production sites, he said.

 

Sponsored by the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA), the InteChem07 conference runs through Wednesday this week.

By: Joe Kamalick
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