2024 Spring Meeting and 20th Global Congress on Process Safety

(104a) Exploring the ALARP Zone


You’ve done a facility siting study and know that your building or site is “safe” - in the ALARP zone - great! But ALARP means “as low as reasonably practicable”. But how do you know if you’re actually “as low as reasonably practicable”? And how do you know when should you dig deeper and do more? At AmSty, we have a scenario that is common amongst several of our plants, where one certain hazard has an outsized impact on the overall risk level. With this information, we sought to: 1) better understand the nuances of this hazard and 2) learn if there were some reasonably practicable changes we could make to protect our employees and assets from the consequences. With the help of CFD modeling by third party experts, we found that there were some simple and relatively inexpensive modifications we could make to mitigate the impacts of these scenarios.