Process Safety related incidents often include a loss of containment, or failure of safeguards/ Safety Critical Elements or lack of operating discipline. Depending on the severity of the incident (or near miss) an investigation including a root cause analysis is needed. These should be performed not only by an independent skilled and qualified investigators, but also someone that has process safety expertise.

Safety Solutions has skilled ICAM investigators who are also process safety competent that can lead an investigation to determine both the technical root cause and systemic contributors to the incident. As part of the latter we will look at how the performance of process safety management at the site contributed to the incident.

Safety Solutions suggests the following approach to investigate process safety incidents:

  1. All categorised process safety events should include a process safety competent team member.
  2. All events to be assessed for BOTH potential and actual consequences.
  3. All incidents with the potential of serious harm or greater are to follow a formal root cause process – led by a trained person. The decision to use root cause analysis is NOT to be based on perceived risk.
  4. Root causes are to drill to systemic causes, not just direct technical causes.
  5. Recommended actions and root causes are to be signed off by an independent person (from the investigating team) as being appropriate to prevent future events.
  6. Action completion dates are to be monitored by senior management as a KPI and the action implementers are held to account to meet these dates.

Contact us to discuss any investigation requirements you may have.

Other useful links

Incident Investigation