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Abstract
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The general principle of hazard control legislation in the UK chemical and petroleum industry is that the operating companies should identify the hazards in their operations and take all reasonably practicable means to control them.
Hazard analysis is one of the tools available to help a responsible manager make decisions and allocate resources where they will do the most good to control the hazards involved.
It is now becoming common practice for local authorities and national agencies to commission studies to estimate the total risk from installations and complexes. For the purpose of discussion, such studies are called risk analysis in this paper, to clearly distinguish them from hazard analysis.
It is argued that risk analysis of this type does not improve decision taking in the area of public safety. It will only do so if the techniques are developed to give results which are generally accepted as meaningful. Perhaps even more importantly, the overall decision-making process must be adapted to ensure that the results are properly weighed against other factors, which currently cannot be quantified.
On the other hand, the techniques of hazard analysis are action oriented and can be part of the decision-making process for a new project or modification of an existing plant. They will not give us an accurate measure of the total risk involved in any proposal, but they will help us identify and rank the major contributors to that risk, and help us decide what is reasonably practicable in reducing it. |