(30c) Mapping an Evacuation in Real-Time: Digital Mustering with Wireless Personnel Location Technology

Wireless technology has transformed evacuations in today's chemical plants, with dashboards showing live muster point headcounts and locations of stranded workers during an emergency. When seconds count, there is no time to take a manual role call or badge in to a muster point. The risks are too high to send someone into harm's way searching for a person who may not even be in the facility. This abstract will explore the issues with mustering procedures today, the medical case for a faster solution, showcase the industrial wireless technology enabling dashboarding of evacuations, and discuss other safety-related use cases for the technology. We will close with an implementation strategy of the technology and the importance of worker privacy alongside a personnel location system. This is meant to enable HSSE, operations, turnaround, or plant managers to implement technology which could help save a life in their facility.

Many plants rely on manual methods of counting personnel at a muster point. Typically, these are in the form of a badge scanner - however we see plants still using manual roll call to determine if everyone has made it out of the facility safety. While the badge scanner seems like an improvement - consider that medical literature, referenced by OSHA, suggests that 3-4 minutes EMS response time is needed when serious, life threatening injuries are at play. Long-term mortality rates double in car accidents when response time goes up from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. With limited badge scanners at a muster point, even with the scanning process taking 5 seconds per person, a 500 person team requires 14 minutes to complete a mustering headcount assuming 3 scanners.

And then, once someone is missing, how do you account for their location? When someone is not present at the muster point, there is an escalation process to identify where they were last seen in the facility. This can involve chaotic radio messages or IM, made significantly more complicated if visitors, contractors, or new employees are in the mix. Additionally, with remote work growing year over year, someone could be working remote during an evacuation. This adds on to the time to rescue a stranded team in the plant. The solutions are able to also keep record of the time to muster, allowing for easy drill record-keeping and the ability to A-B test different evacuation approaches.

Emerson's Location Awareness solution, among other solutions in the marketplace, have proven that digital mustering is the future of successful evacuations in the chemical industry. Industrial Location systems consist of Tags, which are wearable devices given to workers, and Anchors, which detect their position in the plant with Wireless ranging algorithms and transmit the data to Gateways. GPS is not relied upon for all plant areas, as line-of-sight to the sky is limited in Chemical plants, due to pipe racks, indoor facilities, or below-grade operations.

It is important to note that personnel location has become completely Wireless, with battery powered Anchors that are extremely fast to install or remobilize, with Class 1 Div 1 Zone 0 hazardous ratings, and IP66/67 dust and water ingress protection to survive the elements. Emerson's solution, in particular, relies on the WirelessHART standard to upload personnel locations and mustering status through Gateways into the monitoring app, where the facility map and personnel locations are shown. This network can be shared with other IIoT solutions on the WirelessHART standard. Other solutions in the market utilize WiFi or cellular data to get sensor data to the edge.

Beyond mustering, industrial location technology can be used for several other safety use cases - in particular, for remote or lone work in hazardous environments.

• Lone worker status & ability to call for help with "Panic buttons". These allow for safety alarms to be raised, with worker location showing on the screen. Mass e-mail or SMS alerts are commonly utilized for swift response to these critical safety alarms. Links to DCS or other control room dashboards are available in the marketplace.
• No-motion alerts, useful if workers have fallen and are immobilized due to injury.
• "I'm okay" alerts for regular check-in for lone workers.
• Geofencing of permitted, locked-out, or otherwise hazardous areas
• Fatigue management - ensuring time on site does not exceed set shift limits
• & more.

Implementing this solution requires the inclusion of a new PPE device: the Location Tag. For the solution to be successful, the benefits must be explained transparently to workers. The location solutions can be run without personnel data being input into the system - since it does not matter who needs saving, just that a person is stuck in the facility during an evacuation. We have had success with such systems being implemented piecewise into the plant. Considering their wireless nature, expansion is a matter of adding more Gateways, Anchors, and Tags. Starting in the most hazardous places in the plant is common practice, expanding out to more facilities, areas, and functions.