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How do we cope when there is an emergency on site

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By Andrew Perks

As you probably know by now, we have a close relationship with ASTI (that’s the Ammonia Safety training Institute in the US) and I recently was fortunate to be involved in another one of their Ammonia Safety Days. One of the positives from Covid has been the advent of more usage of virtual platforms allowing us much more access to events around the world. The big take away for me from the safety day was the necessity to have a response plan in place. Not just to have a plan in place but to have a structure that would immediately swing into action if and when required.

We are involved in drawing up Site Emergency Plans as prescribed in SANS 1514:2018 and Process Hazard Analysis reports but sometimes I wonder if the clients are really getting with the programme. We have a lot of good legislation in South Africa but with seemingly very few teeth. That of course is always an issue until the brown stuff hits the fan. ASTI make a major play on ‘Managing the First 30 Minutes’. You may ask, surely it’s not just about the first 30 minutes in an incident? Well, I have news for you – those first 30 minutes are where your site incident response will make the difference between a minor, manageable incident and an escalating chaotic catastrophe.

The core of any managed response is a good well-practiced emergency plan exercised by competent experienced responders. Once the clock starts ticking, every minute is critical. To successfully control the situation, facilities must prepare in advance, leadership roles must be clearly defined on organograms distributed around the site indicating names and contact numbers. One of the outcomes of drawing up an emergency plan organogram is that you suddenly realise that the response profile invariably ends up with one person in four to five critical roles. In any emergency, which role is that person going to adopt? They are needed everywhere.

By then it is too late to be trying to unravel that when the problem presents itself. There must be a clear chain of command allowing first responders to take decisive action without a chaotic command structure. One of the past issues in the US was legal: responders who were not trained and accredited were seriously at risk of prosecution if they got involved in an incident and it went pear shaped. If you get it right you are a hero, if you don’t you are in deep trouble – a thin line separates the two.

An operator/first responder must act quickly to assess the situation, allowing them to notify the emergency controller so that an appropriate action plan can be activated to contain the problem and protect lives. While this in essence alludes to an ammonia incident, the emergency plan should cater to any emergency that could arise on a day-to-day basis on site. The objective is to eliminate the chaos and stop problems when they are small, to prevent injury and minimise the damage of what could otherwise develop into a devastating emergency event.

So, what do we do about this? Our Major Hazardous Installation Regulations are quite clear: we need to be ready to contain and control any emergency. The plan recommends that a facility adopts a pre-emergency readiness procedure.

No on-site event that poses an increased level of risk should take place without first undertaking a risk assessment. It only takes five to 10 minutes to set up the pre-emergency readiness checklist where – before starting work – all of the safety measures must be considered and inspected for availability. Almost every event that I have heard of has been because there was an inadequate risk assessment resulting in the event escalating with injury and production disruption. We need to develop a culture of foresight and safety.

That’s all for now. Next time I chat to you I will have been to the iiar conference in the US and will have first-hand feedback on ASTI Ammonia Days in Las Vegas.

About Andrew Perks

Image credit: Andrew Perks

Andrew Perks is a subject expert in ammonia refrigeration. Since undertaking his apprenticeship in Glasgow in the 1960s he has held positions of contracts engineer, project engineer, refrigeration design engineer, company director for a refrigeration contracting company and eventually owning his own contracting company and low temperature cold store. He is now involved in adding skills to the ammonia industry, is merSETA accredited and has written a variety of unit standards for SAQA that define the levels to be achieved in training in our industry.

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