Handbook for Process Safety in Laboratories and Pilot Plants

4 LAPP Risk Management Concepts

4.1 Occupational Safety and Process Safety

When introducing process safety practices in LAPPs, an important step is to ensure that the organization understands that occupational safety and process safety are different. Both occupational safety and process safety are important to protect workers but the focus of the two is not the same. Occupational Safety (and Health) is focused on incident prevention through programs that are aimed at minimizing the risk of occupational injury from physical as well as chemical hazards. Process safety is focused on proven methods and practices for the design, operation and maintenance of equipment and control of changes to:

• prevent loss of control or containment events
• mitigate consequences or impacts from loss of control or containment events should they occur

When a LAPP has a hazardous chemical incident, not only is the health of the worker at risk, but the loss of control meets the criteria for being a process safety event. The loss of control includes unexpected or runaway reactions as well as loss of containment from leaks or spills.

A second important step is to ensure that leaders understand that occupational safety and health performance such as low Total Recordable Injuries (TRI), incident free days, and low total number of injuries often has little relevance regarding how well the risks associated with loss of control or containment of chemicals are being managed. This is because many of the underlying ...