It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye

It can be a weird thing being an engineer in the energy sector. We sit in our nice warm office, or air-conditioned meeting room, and are often separated by many kilometres of land and sea, and even multiple time-zones, from the places where the risks we influence are located. The models, the drawings, the computer programmes can feel remote from the engineering reality. And as the computers get more sophisticated and the modelling more realistic, it can seem from the outside that we are playing with the risks, rather than influencing them. I’ve had more than one person dismiss detailed modelling of items as “playstation for engineers”.

But we do influence the risks, even from our remote locations. I once was lucky enough to be in a group conversation with Dame Judith Hackitt, who at the time was head of the UK Health and Safety Executive and president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. Her contention was that while the actual events that caused the Piper Alpha disaster may have been on that fateful day in July 1988, the engineering decision to upgrade the facility with compression facilities directly beside the accommodation module without managing the explosion risk were what made the disaster possible. And that was done by engineers, probably like me, trying to deliver the value that their client wanted.

I’m currently in the middle of facilitating a 5 yearly revalidation HAZOP of a major offshore producing facility. This facility is in the top 5 in the UKCS in terms of oil production, has hundreds of people onboard, and we are looking at the risks now that the plant has been up and running for 5 years. In line with most company HAZOP procedures, we have an experienced operator in the room, helping us understand the differences between the plant as envisaged (and shown on the drawings) and how it actually performs. It’s a pretty new facility, built to modern engineering standards, and to date we haven’t found much that would cause great concern. We’ll probably end up raising some engineering query actions, tweak some test intervals for critical safety equipment, emphasise some things and de-emphasise some others based on our current understanding of the risk.

HAZOP, when you’re in it, is not the most exciting of tasks. Its power lies in the ability to use an easily understood accident model to help design out foreseeable hazards. With 21st century control and shutdown systems, we can do more than ever before, react to more complicated situations reliably, and expose people to lower and lower levels of risk. But as I continue to think about how I can influence risk, I spend more time thinking about what we might be missing, than what it is we are finding.

Robert Kennedy used to quote George Bernard Shaw: “Some look at the world as it is and say “why”? I dream of things that never were and think “why not”?” The next accident we have will never be exactly the same as any one before. And it might be obvious in hindsight, but how obvious is it in foresight? And how do we use our creativity and imagination to help remove the risks that are to be faced?

Because I don’t face those risks myself. It’s Callum, Ross, John, Marie, the operators in the room with us on the HAZOP, and the people on the plant, that face those risks. And it might feel like a game or an academic exercise. But for them, it’s real risk, and that’s our responsibility to remember. All fun and games until someone loses an eye.