The US Chemical Safety Board has requested a $13 million budget for financial year 2021, plus a onetime request of $400,000 support of a new chemical incident reporting rule initiative. More on the request here. The CSB has also released an updated animation covering the 2005 explosion at the BP America Texas City refinery. The landmark investigation ‘revealed safety gaps at refineries across the country’. In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Exxon Mobil must produce information to the CSB related to a tank filled with hydrofluoric acid at the site of a 2015 oil refinery explosion in Torrance, California. A PDF of the case is available at US Courts.
DNV GL has is working on Safety 4.0, a framework of work processes, methods, and tools to assure the safety of novel subsea technologies. Safety 4.0 includes integrated solutions, advanced sensor data and analytics and ‘new safety philosophies’. ‘Novel subsea technologies can be complicated because current standards may be hard to apply and there may be a bias against new concepts’. More from DNV GL.
A study of over 1,000 failure cases by DNV GL finds that tubes and piping are the most failure-prone components in oil and gas. Fatigue and corrosion are the most common failure types. 27% of failures occur in tubes and piping, and 20% in rotating machinery. Fatigue (30%) and corrosion (19%) make up nearly half of the primary failure types occurring in the cases DNV GL analyzed. Brittle fracture, overload and wear are also in the top five.
A new publication from the EU Agency for Safety and Health at Work investigates the impact of digitalization on occupational safety and health. The study explores the potential and challenges arising from digitalization and how it is shaping working lives and workers’ safety and health with the arrival of VR, automation and robotics and worker monitoring in the context of regulations.
The Gulf Research Program is awarding $7.25 million eight projects to address safety culture in the offshore oil and gas industry. Safer Offshore Energy Systems covers four projects focusing on different aspects of safety culture, including employee well-being and mindfulness, safety incident data sharing, risk scenario modeling, and the measurement of organizational safety culture.
Lloyds Register’s Aurora is applying data science to occupational health and safety information. Natural language processing (NLP) can transform textual information into normalized, structured data that can be interpreted and analyzed. Correlating OHS information with operational data, such as vehicle telemetry, working hours or HR demographics can reveal factors that influence performance. The LR Aurora SafetyScanner turns accident description data from multiple sources into ‘meaningful insights’.
Following a competitive pilot, National Oilwell Varco has awarded MiX Telematics a contract for the provision of its fleet safety solution across its light-duty vehicles in US and Canada. MiX technology is used to decrease risky driving behavior amongst employees.
UL (formerly Underwriters Laboratories) has opened a new hazardous locations customer service center in Houston. The new facility offers collaborative safety services to the upstream, midstream and downstream oil and gas industry. The center was established to mitigate ignition source fires with risk management. In the greater Houston area, a major chemical incident occurs once every six weeks. More from UL Houston.
The IOGP has opened a new portal for interactive data reporting and download. The portal exposes IOGP-curated data on safety, health, and environmental performance.
A study, Suicide rates by industry and occupation from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention finds that in 2017, men working in mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction had the highest rate of suicide, at 54.2 per 100,000. The average across all industries studied was 18.0, up from 13 in 2000. The CDC recommends that all can benefit from a comprehensive approach to suicide prevention as proposed in its publication Preventing Suicide: A technical package of policy, programs and practices.
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