Within the COMAH regime, the Safety Report Assessment Manual defines a human action as ‘Safety Critical’ if the failure of the human action could cause or contribute substantially to a major accident, or the purpose of the human action is prevent or limit the effect of a major accident.
Safety Critical Tasks are generally categorised into the following groups:
Human Error Initiation Actions that have the potential to initiate an event sequence, e.g. inappropriate valve operation causing a loss of containment.
Intervention Actions Actions required to stop an incident sequence, e.g. activation of ESD system.
Escalation Prevention Actions Actions that may escalate an incident, e.g. inadequate maintenance of a deluge system.
Major hazard sites should have a system in place for the identification of safety and environmentally critical tasks at the site, specifically those which could initiate, prevent, control or mitigate the consequences of major accident hazards.
KK Risk can assist with the identification of Safety Critical Tasks by applying a systematic approach to existing HAZOPs, LOPAs, Bowtie analyses, etc. to identify tasks in each of the three categories listed above. We can then support the creation of a prioritised programme of task and human failure analyses that accounts for the full range of safety-critical tasks at the site.
