Past Event - Boats, Bridges and Backups
Speaker:
Roger Stokes, BakerRisk Europe Ltd
Presenter Bio:
Roger Stokes graduated from UMIST (Manchester, UK) as a Chemical Engineer and spent 10 years at ICI in various technical roles, leading to a position in plant management. He then spent 23 years in the insurance industry investigating incidents at chemical and petrochemical plants, joining Baker Risk in 2015. He works out of the BakerRisk Europe Ltd. (UK) office as part of the Process Safety Group, and focusses on incident investigations, insurance risk engineering, Process Safety Management and Process Hazard Analysis. He is also part of the BakerRisk Low Carbon Energy Group, focussing on the hazards, risks and mitigations of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS).
He has delivered presentations and training on incident investigation, BESS and on process safety, at process safety conferences and for undergraduate students.
Presentation Synopsis:
Electrical power, steam, compressed air, nitrogen, hydraulic systems, other energy sources and key utilities such as cooling water are essential for the safe and reliable operation of many facilities. The provision of reliable back-up systems is necessary in the event that one of these supplies is lost. However, events have occurred where the loss of multiple systems, potentially originating from the failure of a single service or common cause failures, have resulted in consequences that were not considered by either the original or subsequent risk assessments.
Back-up systems are not always available, and operations/maintenance teams are often reluctant to fully test them in case they result in loss of supply or consequences that they were intending to prevent in the first place.
Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis (HIRA) should identify the requirement for back-up systems but might not consider events when these systems fail. Complacency regarding the reliability of back-up systems could lead to the “unsinkable Titanic approach”, whereby site management and operational staff mistakenly believe the backups are sufficiently robust.
This talk provides some examples where back-up systems have failed and offers advice on design, operation, and maintenance to reduce the risk of failure. It discusses procedures, human factors, and emergency exercises that should be considered in the event there is a total failure of back-up systems.
Date: Tuesday 13th May 2025
Video recording and presentation is available to view in the members area of the OPERA website for current OPERA members only.