The escape of toxic methyl isocyanate vapour from the Union Carbide India Limited plant at Bhopal in India on December 1984 was the most serious process plant incident in history, causing thousands of deaths and many tens of thousands of severe injuries, many of them causing permanent incapacity. This and the explosion at the Phillips Petroleum polyethylene plant at Pasadena on 23 October 1989, which killed 23 people and injured hundreds more, alerted management and governments to the need for much more than traditional occupational safety and health programs to provide safety for those working in, or living around, process plants.
Loss prevention is not only concerned with incidents that cause injury to people. It covers all forms of loss, including damage to the environment and property, and interruption to production caused by major failures of a plant, even when there is no injury to people or damage to the surroundings. Avoidance or minimization of the risks of all these types of incident is embraced by the field of Industrial Plant Risk and Reliability Management.
There are many reasons why organizations may be concerned with managing their risks. These range from avoidance of injury or the cost of replacing damaged equipment, to such matters as maintaining a good public image or avoiding legal claims or prosecution of senior managers for negligence.
This course is designed to cover the latest techniques in risk management (the systematic approach to identifying hazards, assessing the risks from each, and targeting resources to prevent accidents), and reliability management in process plants, and production facilities.