Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J.

Baker

INTRODUCTION TO SAFETY, RELIABILITY AND RISK 1. Why studying safety engineering and risk management for engineers? Whatever branch of engineering you, the reader, are currently studying or practising it is difficult to escape the fact that you cannot ignore safety, reliability or risk issues. This course is a core module for four Postgraduate Taught Programmes at the School of Engineering, University of Aberdeen: Subsea Engineering, Renewable Energy, Oil and Gas Engineering, and Safety and Reliability Engineering. All these programmes relate to the energy sector which, including its complex and interdependent technical systems is both a critical infrastructure and key resource for the functioning of todays society and economy. Safety engineering and risk management in energy sector are of crucial importance. Accidents in the energy sector often affect peoples health and property, the supply of economic goods and services, and degrade ecosystems and their functions. Although accidents in the energy sector have been shown to form the second largest group of man-made accidents (after transportation), their level of coverage and completeness was not satisfactory because they were commonly not surveyed and analyzed separately, but just as a part of technological accidents (Hirschberg et al., 1998).

Figure 1, Number of fatalities in severe ( 5 fatalities) accidents that occurred in natural disasters and man-made accidents in the period 1969 to 2000.

Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J. Baker

Severe accidents in the energy sector have been identified as one of the main contributors to manmade disasters. The Energy-Related Severe Accident Database (ENSAD) was developed, established and is continuously updated by the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). Figure 1 from ENSAD shows the number of fatalities world-wide in different types of accidents over this period of more than 30 years. Values exhibit large annual fluctuations because great catastrophes have a strong influence. The figure shows that the single deadliest power generation disaster isn't Chernobyl, but the 1975 Shimantan/Banqiao dam failure, by several orders of magnitude. The need for organisations to consider safety and reliability requires little introduction. The most recent information from the HSE on loss of life and major injuries in the U.K.'s Oil and Gas industry shows that, in the period 1995-2006, 24 individuals lost their lives and almost 600 experienced a major injury, including loss of limb, burn, or fracture (HSE statistics [1]). The major injury and fatality data is presented in Figure 2. These are not dry statistics: every one of these killed or injured individuals had families and colleagues who experienced devastating losses.

Figure 2, Human Cost of U.K.s offshore oil and gas industry. (from Offshore Injury, Ill Health and Incident Statistics 2005/2006, UK Health and Safety Executive, 2007)

These human losses are not the only driver for high safety and reliability. The financial costs associated with incidents involving harm to employees and/or the public are substantial. The Piper-Alpha disaster in 1988, which resulted in 167 lives lost, cost the company involved (Occidental) an estimated two

Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J. Baker

billion pounds in direct losses. The derailment of a high speed train at Hatfield in 2000 followed earlier incidents at Southall in 1997 (27 fatalities, 139 Injuries [2]) , and Ladbrooke Grove in 1999 (31 fatalities and 400 injuries [3]). The incident led to the collapse of Railtrack PLC. into administration and partial re-nationailsation. At its peak the company had a market capitalisation of approximately $7.5Billion. These two high profile examples give an insight into the importance of safety to a company's business. Wright and Marsden [4] estimated that the annual tangible costs to business in the U.K. from accidents in the workplace included $828M in compensation; $56M in mandatory sick-pay; and, $1,100M in salary paid while the employee was off work, a total of $1,924M per annum in 1995. In addition, the authors noted that society (the state) spends a further $1,000-1,500M per annum on a combination of medical treatment, accident investigation, and industrial injuries disability benefit, bringing the overall total to $3,000-3,500M. Haefeli [5] et al quote $3,500-7,000M per annum from other sources. These figures however do not include the cost of replacing damaged plant, loss of output, and loss of goodwill of staff and stakeholders. Clearly, preventing incidents which lead to loss of life and injuries in the workplace is both a moral and financial imperative for companies. The disciplines of safety, reliability, and risk management seek to prevent such incidents, and are worth studying in detail as a result. Every prospective safety engineer needs a thorough understanding of the principles and techniques involved. Under UK health and safety legislation the ultimate responsibility for health and safety of the workforce lies with senior management and, if fatal accidents occur, directors and senior managers may be prosecuted and even sent to prison. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007[1] was a landmark in the evolution of UK law and companies and organisations can now be found guilty of corporate manslaughter (in Scotland, corporate culpable homicide) as a result of serious management failures resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care [2]. This applies as much to organisations such as universities as it does to companies extracting oil and gas from the North Sea. The Act clarifies the criminal liabilities of companies including large organisations where serious failures in the management of health and safety result in a fatality. The law and legal framework in other countries may differ considerably from that in the UK, but without it companies and organisations are likely to perform very badly with regard to workforce safety and the safety of the general public. Also, it is clear that the standards that were perhaps considered acceptable by the general public at the time of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century were far lower than the standards that are considered acceptable now. What is also clear is that major industrial accidents have had a marked influence on safety legislation in the UK, and this legislation in turn has had both a direct and an indirect effect on companies safety performance. As far as North Sea oil and gas is concerned, the Piper Alpha disaster of July 1988 [3] brought about a complete change in the way health and safety is managed in UK offshore waters, with the introduction of the Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 1992, subsequently revised in 2005 [see 4, 5] and the transfer of responsibilities for offshore activities from the UK Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J. Baker

Earlier industrial accidents in the UK have also led to major changes in the law, probably the most important being the Aberfan Colliery disaster [6] in October 1966. When the Report was published on August 3rd 1967 it had no qualms about making perfectly clear who was to blame: the Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack of direction from above. Not villains but decent men, led astray by foolishness or by ignorance or by both in combination, are responsible for what happened at Aberfan. It concluded: Blame for the disaster rests upon the National Coal Board. This is shared, though in varying degrees, among the NCB headquarters, the South Western Divisional Board, and certain individuals. The legal liability of the NCB to pay compensation of the personal injuries, fatal or otherwise, and damage to property is incontestable and uncontested. This and other industrial accidents led to the UK Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, 1974 [7], which is the primary legislation which has now governed UK health and safety for 38 years and led to the setting up of the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Health and Safety Commission (HSC). Another notable accident was the cyclohexane explosion that took place in the Nypro UK works at Flixborough [8] in June 1974 which killed 28 workers and seriously injured many others. This completely devastated the works and surrounding area, and led directly to the Control of Industrial Major Accident Hazards Regulations, 1984, known as the CIMAH Regulations. These have now been replaced by the COMAH Regulations (Control of Major Accident Hazards Regulations 1999) [9]. Health and safety responsibilities extend to all levels in an organisation, and all organisations in the UK employing five or more people are required by law to have a written health and safety policy. Safety and reliability is of course much broader than the safety of people it is also concerned with financial loss. Accidents such as the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea in 1988 which led to the loss of 167 lives also cost the then operator, Occidental, about 2 bn in direct losses as well as a severe loss to its reputation as an offshore company which forced it to leave the North Sea. The more recent Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico has resulted in losses that are still unknown but are likely to be in the region of 25 bn, as well as in loss of life. Those of you studying Oil and Gas Engineering and Subsea Engineering will soon come to realise that an essential part of your work will be to design and operate facilities in a safe and reliable manner. Problems occurring subsea tend to be very costly to put right even if they do not cause injuries and loss of life. Part of this course is therefore directed towards assessing the reliability of complex systems in performing their design functions and maintaining high availability. 2. Comparing safety for different energy sources From safety perspective we review the current energy sources.

Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J. Baker

TWh stands for TeraWatt Hours, a unit of energy equal to 1012 watt hours. The terawatt hour is large enough for us to conveniently express annual electricity generation for a whole country. Occupational health and safety statistics of the World Health Organization track the deaths of workers in the different industries. Figure 3 of 2008 statistics shows the deaths per TWh for different energy sources including coal, oil, peat, biofuel and biomass, natural gas, hydropower and nuclear energy.

Figure 3, Deaths per TWh by energy source.

Accident rate can be quite different among countries. World average for coal is about 161 deaths per TWh generated. USA average is 15 deaths per TWh; China average is 278 deaths per TWh. This demonstrates that safety engineering is a multidisciplinary subject it also relates to legislation and politics. The safety of solar energy is not shown in Figure 3 due to lack of data. The rooftop solar panel installations (millions of roofs) need to consider roof worker safety. For about 1000 construction fatalities per year in the US alone, 33% of them are from working at heights. Roofing is the 6th most dangerous job. Roofers had a fatality rate in 2002 of 37 per 100,000 workers. Generally, solar panels last 20-30 years since the waterproof seals on the panels tend to deteriorate over time. We will further develop Mean-Time-To-Failure concept later in classical reliability theory to describing the random life distribution issue. 3. Introduction to the course The course serves as the entrance to the field of safety and reliability engineering with the introduction of the basic concepts and tools of reliability and risk analysis. Legal frames related to engineering safety will also be introduced. The course is basically composed of six sections, as follows: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) Introduction and basic definitions Basic concepts in probability theory Classical reliability theory Modelling of engineering systems for reliability assessment Availability modelling for engineering systems

Fundamental Safety Engineering and Risk Management Concepts, 2012/2013 by H. Tan and M.J. Baker

6) UK safety legislations, including historic development. Health and Safety at Work Act, offshore and other regulations. Necessary theory in probability and statistics will be involved in classical reliability theory, modelling of engineering systems for reliability assessment, and availability modelling for engineering systems. Tools of reliability and risk analysis, including Reliability Block Diagram, fault Tree Analysis, Event Tree Analysis and Bayesian network modelling, will be introduced. After finishing the module, students will have a thorough understanding on the concept of risk and reliability, understand the legal requirement and the rationales behind, and start to build up the capacity to do risk assessment.

REFERENCES [1] Great Britain. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. London : The Stationery Office. [2] see http://www.hse.gov.uk/corpmanslaughter/about.htm [3] Cullen, The Honourable Lord. The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. London : The Stationery Office, 1990. [4] Great Britain. The Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 1992. London : The Stationery Office. [5] Health and Safety Executive [HSE]. A guide to the Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 2005. HSE Publications, 2006. [6] Report on the Inquiry into the Aberfan Disaster. London : The Stationery Office, 1966. [7] Great Britain. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. London : The Stationery Office. [8] Health and Safety Executive, The Flixborough Disaster: Report of the Court of Inquiry. HMSO, 1975. [9] Great Britain. Control of Major Accident Hazard Regulations 1999. London : The Stationery Office. [10] Hirschberg S., Spiekerman G. & Dones R. (1998). Severe Accidents in the Energy Sector. PSI Report No. 98-16, Villigen-PSI, November 1998.