The Process Safety Professional. OSHA (Part 7)

We are writing a book The Process Safety Professional. The current Table of Contents is available here. We are gradually releasing the contents of the book to paid subscribers. This is the seventh release.

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The previous post in this series noted that there are four important regulatory bodies when it comes to process safety management. The first organization in that list was OSHA, the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The Bhopal catastrophe in the year 1984 was a pivotal event in the development of process safety standards. It was clear that fundamental improvements were needed. But Bhopal was not the only serious chemical plant incident that occurred around that time. A series of fires and chemical releases, particularly in the United States, made it clear that “something must be done”. Consequently, executives from many of the large chemical companies got together in the late 1980s to develop a process safety management standard. (The companies included Monsanto, ICI Americas, DuPont and Dow.)

In the early 1990s the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) used this industry standard as the basis of their Process Safety Management standard, formally known as 29 CFR 1910.119 Process safety management of highly hazardous chemicals (Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 1992).

This standard provided the basis for most process safety programs in the United States, and for many organizations in other nations. It is organized around the fourteen management elements shown in Table 4.1.