Emergency Planning and Response: A Challenge in Process Safety Management. Lessons to Learn from the Oil and Gas Industry

Emergency Planning and Response: A challenge in Process Safety Management. Lessons to Learn from the Oil and Gas Industry.

Inadequate or poor emergency planning or response has been a recurring finding in Process Safety Management Incident investigations worldwide. One of the very early CSB investigations, the Herrig Brothers Farm Propane Tank Explosion, made an emergency response recommendation for training for firefighers, as did the recently closed West Fertilizer Investigation.

 To date, 14 CSB –US Chemical Safety Board investigations have found deficiencies in a community’s, facility’s or emergency responder’s response to an incident at a chemical facility. The majority of CSB’s recommendations relating to emergency response can be categorized in the following areas:

Training for emergency responders, including hazardous materials training;

Local emergency planning and community response plans and teams;

Use of community notification systems;

Use of an incident command system and the National Incident Management System;

Conducting emergency response exercises;

Information sharing between facilities, emergency responders and the community; and

Communication during emergencies (including 911 operator communication, interoperability of radios, etc).

The objective of this presentation is to describe each of these major recommendations and how to improve each one in the oil and gas industry in order to reach useful, practical and effective Emergency Response Plans.