Sounds of the Process Unit – they all matter. What can we learn?

In my current working activities I often get asked to use senses as valid safeguards to prevent hazardous situations within high hazard facilities.

The methodologies developed by the late Trevor Kletz and his team always require more tangible protections that can be audited and tested regularly.

I often get study team members laughing when I ask how often they calibrate their employees’ ears, noses, eyes etc to take a valid claim.

In this last week I was reminded of a couple of situations where my hearing was challenged:

• Firstly, where my site had a total loss of power and I was called in to ensure that the supervisory system, that I was custodian of, was working correctly. In addition to be on hand if it needed to be shutdown safely if the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) came to the end of the battery life. The site was eerily quiet, I had never experienced the site in such a state, and it was strange.
  
• Secondly, upgrading a set of control room equipment. The equipment had been transitioning between pneumatic instrumentation to fully electronic equipment. The equipment switch meant that we removed parallax errors from reading gauges due to different height of operators. BUT despite the much easier way of taking readings multiple times per shift I got some complaints, because on nights the control room was too quiet!

The reminder came in a HAZOP session, where the discussion was around whether any pipework modifications were needed to prevent a hazardous situation but removed a route for priming an air pump. A team member (you know who you are) then gave us a full rendition of an air pump being primed and used in an almost similar installation (very much shortened):

‘Glurg Glurg rumble rumble whine whine clunk clunk hissssssss’

The surroundings that we work in each day can tell us a lot about what we are doing to our equipment, we can’t appreciate this from control rooms, offices or on drawings. The real experiences of our surroundings are really useful in understanding what is going on.

New ears might pick something up that the regular plant operators don’t hear. This is why it is so important for managers, supervisors and engineers to take plant walks. We all know that this can be a challenge with ever increasing diaries filling with meetings and the hundreds of emails per day.

These plants tours help us in our roles and introduce opportunity to engage with those running and maintaining the equipment to share in an informal way concerns over equipment performance, operational conditions and frustrations of doing things safely.

Equally our operators will tell you that ‘it always sounds like that’ which might then explain damage seen on the previous overhaul / inspection. Or you might be surprised to have the response ‘We’ve reported it and no-one is bothered’. It might be a heart-warming response of ‘We heard that this morning and we have called maintenance who are coming over after lunch’ to enable looking at the equipment before failure.

Maybe we ought to commission some chart toppers ‘Sounds from the Process Industry’ well if a group of musicians can issue an album of silence then anything’s possible. I’d love to hear about the strangest experiences that you’ve had with operators and maintainers senses being challenged….