GCI TECH NOTES ©


Volume 19, Number 01
A Gossman Consulting, Inc. Publication
July 2023

Hazard Assessment Methods for Controlling Risks to the Environment, Business, Workers and the Public

 by David Gossman, Gossman Consulting, Inc.

Introduction

This author, since the early 1980s, has been involved in developing systems to protect the environment, corporate interest, employee health and safety, and the public.  This paper provides an introduction for companies to consider how, when, and what type of hazard analysis is performed to limit corporate liability, control costs, improve quality control and protect people.

Available Hazard Risk Assessment Methods

“Hazard Analysis for System Safety”1 by Ericson is an excellent comprehensive text that delves into the details of over 20 different hazard analysis techniques. It is highly recommended by the author who has used this text as a foundation for teaching hazard analysis classes internationally. There are pre-operation techniques, job or task based methods, post incident or near miss processes and even specialty techniques such as those used for software risk assessments.

System safety has, at its core, an eight element process as established in the military standard MIL-STD-882E,2 shown in Table 1. This DOD document outlines the process of risk assessments for a variety of situations and systems required by the military. It is another excellent resource for performing any of a variety of risk assessments. MIL-STD-882F, the latest update of this standard issued as a draft, does a more comprehensive job of integrating risk assessments of the software systems into the overall process.

Table 1 Risk Assessment Process

Element 1:

Document the System Safety Approach

Element 5:

Reduce Risk

Element 2:

Identify and

Document Hazards

Element 6:

Verify, Validate and Document Risk Reduction

Element 3:

Assess and

Document Risk

Element 7:

Accept Risk

and Document

Element 4:

Identify and Document

Risk Mitigation Measures

Element 8:

Manage Life-Cycle

Risk

 

NFPA 551: Guide for the Evaluation of Fire Risk Assessments applies when fire risks are of concern. A significant portion of this guide is based on the previously mentioned military standard.

Choosing the Best Method for a Situation

Part of determining which type of risk assessment is appropriate is looking at the circumstances of when and why the assessment is being performed. Many of the available techniques are used at different stages during project development such as preplanning, design, construction and pre-operation. Others are best used in an ongoing operation or just prior to/during a change in operations. Other techniques are more frequently used as a result of an incident or “near-miss.” Commonly used in the latter is the Root Cause Analysis.

Worker Based Risk Assessment Options

A number of risk assessment techniques are well suited to target the protection of worker health and safety. These include Hazard and Operability Analysis (HAZOP),3 Health Hazard Assessments, and other forms of risk assessments that focus on identifying and mitigating risks for worker tasks. 

Risk Exposure Scenarios for the Public

Generally, risk assessments that are focused on workers and/or protecting facilities do an excellent job of protecting off-site members of the public. That said, there are some special areas that may require a more detailed look at off-site risks.

One of those would be emissions or releases from a facility. EPA often requires some form of air quality modeling and risk assessment during the initial permitting stage of a facility and often requires updates of this information once a facility is in operation and/or periodically based on actual emission tests.

Another off-site risk is based on a theoretical or actual on-site incident that results in a sudden release. Again, this may require modeling to determine the extent of the off-site risk. For certain hazardous materials, notification, and even training, may be needed for local fire departments and other emergency response personnel.

Finally, the off-site transport of both products and byproducts of a process may need a risk assessment. The off-site transport of products is often an issue that is overlooked. Production is dealt with and end consumer communications are dealt with, but not the intermediate step(s) of moving the product from the production facility to the ultimate marketplace.

Food safety is an especially important concern for risk assessments and the FDA has a number of programs designed around this concept.

Business Risks

Insurance companies in particular may look at a facility’s active safety and risk assessment programs and find fault in the lack of attention to protecting facility physical assets and ongoing operations. For this reason, and just good business practice, it is important to consider risks and incident scenarios that do not necessarily endanger employees, but could damage equipment and/or result in significant downtime for an operation.

For example, perhaps a change in raw materials is missed that results in bad product that is caught in the process quality control program prior to leaving the facility but does not control that risk adequately prior to the raw materials entering the process. This is an especially good reason to have personnel who have a clear understanding of the process involved in performing the risk assessment, not just a corporate safety engineer who may not have the needed experience to identify these types of risks.

Environmental Risks

For certain operations handling highly hazardous materials, EPA may require risk assessments for personnel, the public and the environment. However it need not be a highly hazardous material to have the potential for serious environmental impacts. For example, something that is not a significant risk for people can be a real risk to aquatic species in a nearby body of water. Further, incidents that damage the environment often create huge monetary liabilities via fines and remediation as well as damage to a business's reputation and, from there, their market. For these reasons, at every temporal stage in the risk assessment process, make sure that environmental risks are evaluated and appropriately mitigated.

Conclusion

There are over 100 different types of risk assessments currently published and in potential use. This has come about as a result of a growing awareness over the last 60+ years of the real hazards associated with numerous activities, from riding a bike or horse, to running a large industrial plant, to sending rockets into space. Identifying and mitigating those risks in advance of an incident is clearly the preferred option over learning something “the hard way.”

About the Author

David Gossman started his career on the engineering staff at a nuclear particle accelerator laboratory where it was often said that the engineers spent half their time working to prevent the physicists from killing themselves. Since then he provided early leadership to develop safe and secure systems for recycling wastes including hazardous wastes. He has designed, operated and built laboratories for quality testing designed to control and mitigate hazards to people, processes and the environment. He is a Certified Fire and Explosion Investigator and has performed many investigations of fires, explosions and incidents of chemical exposure and developed a comprehensive under-standing of what can go wrong and just how bad the end result of such incidents can be. He can bring that experience to bear on the needs of your operations

References

1Ericson, Clifton A., Hazard analysis techniques for system safety, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2005.

2Department of Defense Standard of Practice – System Safety, United States Department of Defense, May 2012, p. 9.

3https://gcisolutions.com/library/gci_tech_notes/gcitn199808.html

Please contact David Gossman at 563-652-2822 or by e-mail at dgossman@gcisolutions.com for additional information.