Chemical safety board investigation reports and the hierarchy of controls: Round 2.

Twenty‐five reports of the US Chemical Safety Board over the period December 2009–May 2016 were analyzed for evidence of examples related to inherent safety, passive, and active engineered safety, and procedural safety. These measures were also analyzed for their contribution to incident prevention and consequence mitigation, as well as their applicability to specific elements of the PSM system recommended by the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering. This work represents the continuation of a previous study that performed a similar analysis for 60 CSB reports written during the period 1998–2010. The update provided here further illustrates the significant value of CSB investigation reports in demonstrating lessons learned and in training and educational efforts. Procedural safety was identified as the most common risk control measure cited in CSB reports, while the efficacy of inherent safety principles in incident prevention and mitigation has been consistently recognized by the CSB in its investigations. Risk reduction efforts aimed at incident prevention were found to be cited more often than those aimed at consequence mitigation. Active engineered safety measures were determined to be common among mitigation efforts due to the prevalence in the process industries of emergency alarms and fire suppression systems. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 37: 459–466, 2018 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]