Abstract
Industrial accidents, though unwanted and often catastrophic, serve as valuable sources of information for identifying deficiencies in the process safety management of chemical plants. Severe accidents have usually been an occasion to revise standards and recommendations for process safety. Many national and international organizations (such as the European Commission, the Institution of Chemical Engineers, or the Chemical Safety Board) constantly produce reports and accident reconstructions, providing invaluable data to improve the level of process safety. The scope of this paper is to highlight deficiencies in the reporting system, which often leads to confusion in the use of information about industrial accidents. The paper analyses a set of 19 worldwide chemical accident reports from different sources, involving acrylic substances and ethylene oxide. A Root Cause Analysis is applied to those accidents, based on identifying the failures of the Process Safety Management. The failure of elements is based on a merged system proposed by the authors on the guidelines proposed by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). It is shown that, according to the information provided, only in the 37% of observed cases a Root Cause could be identified. It would be of great help in identifying a more standardized and global approach to reporting industrial accidents, with the scope of providing valuable information to improve process safety worldwide.
