Page 116 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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94 Serious Incident Prevention

Process Safety Management Standard

The objective of OSHA’s Process Safety Management (PSM) standard
is to prevent accidental releases of hazardous materials. The standard strives
to meet these objectives by requiring employers to execute the critical work
as outlined by the standard. The objective of the work required by the stan-
dard is to provide for the proactive mitigation or prevention of potential re-
leases due to failures in processes, procedures, or equipment.
The PSM standard has much to offer. The types of critical actions re-
quired by the standard provide a solid foundation for an effective safety
process even for employers not handling hazardous materials. When com-
pared to the eight-element serious incident prevention process, however, we
find that the elements of the Process Safety Management Standard are pri-
marily a listing of critical work to be done with little to offer in ensuring that
the work is diligently executed consistent with established standards.
Organizations will also find that many actions beyond PSM compliance
will be required for sustained success. Thus, the elements of PSM should be
considered as a subset of the universe of critical work required to achieve
and sustain serious incident free operations.
The actions required by the PSM standard, however, can be a very im-
portant part of the total work required to maintain safe operations. The re-
quired elements of the standard include:

Employee participation
Process safety information
Process hazards analysis
Operating procedures
Training
Contractors
Prestartup safety review
Mechanical integrity
Hot work permit
Management of change
Incident investigation
Emergency planning and response
Compliance audits

The full text of OSHA PSM standards is located in the Code of Federal
Regulations 29 CFR 1910.119. One of the elements of the PSM standard is