February 2001

Planning for the Unthinkable
Process Safety and Risk Management Planning
by Wade Whitlock
A. & L. Shatto, Inc. Staff
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If you dodged the Title V, Part 70 Operating Permit; and you ducked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Process Safety Management; just remember that things do seem to come in threes.

The Beginning
On February 24, 1992 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) promulgated a regulation requiring employers to comply with requirements for worksite employee safety in 29 CFR 1910.119, the Process Safety Management (PSM) Standard. This regulation requires, among other things:

• Employee Participation

• Process Safety Information

• Process Hazard Analysis

• Operating Procedures

• Training

• Contractor Safety

• Pre-Startup Safety Review

• Mechanical Integrity

• Hot Work Permit

• Management of Change

• Incident Investigation

• Emergency Planning and Response

• Compliance Audits.

The listing of PSM components above does not begin to provide the wealth of detail that is in the regulation. A checklist used by the author's firm (A. & L. Shatto, Inc.), for tracking a PSM project is 4½ pages of single-spaced type.

The Process Hazard Analysis, which is the first step in the Process Safety Management analysis and planning process, was to have been completed on or before 29 May, 1997.

As with most OSHA regulations, PSM did not extend beyond the worksite fence line, or cover most governmental agencies and organizations. Process Safety Management; 29 CFR 1910.119, contains a list of "pure" chemicals and threshold values that is one of the means of determining applicability.

The Arrival
In response to accidental industrial releases in Flixborough, England; Serveso, Italy; Bhopal, India; and Institute, West Virginia, Congress placed a mandate in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (Section 112(r)) requiring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate regulations addressing the prevention of accidental releases and reducing the severity of off-site consequences of an accidental release, when it does occur. The Final Rule for the Risk Management Program, 40 CFR 68, was signed on May 24, 1996. The Rule was published in the Federal Register on June 20, 1996, and became effective August 19, 1996.

The EPA produced regulations that incorporated the OSHA provisions, and extended them beyond the fence line to consider the consequences to "Public Receptors" and "Environmental Receptors." Public Receptors include residential areas, anywhere the public has free access (even a road through your facility), schools, recreational areas, commercial and industrial sites. The Environmental Receptors are wildlife refuges and management areas, and Federal and State parks.

If you are already involved in the preparation of a Process Safety Management Plan, you have a very good head start. Everything that you have worked on so far will be usable for the EPA Program. The major additions will be the off-site consequences modeling, receptor identification, and any necessary modification to your Emergency Response Plan.

The Requirements
If you have been congratulating yourself on avoiding PSM, think again, because you have a great deal of work in front of you. The Risk Management Plan program will require you to prepare the following sections:

• Process Safety Information

• Process Hazard Analysis

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

• Training

• Maintenance

• Compliance Audit

• Incident Investigation

• Off-site Consequences Modeling and Analysis

• Emergency Response Plan

• EPA submission form

Look familiar? Clearly,  the EPA has read the OSHA regulations!

Many  water and wastewater facilities have no idea about Process Safety Management, have vague ideas about Risk Management Planning, or intend to avoid the requirement by inventory control. In one case, the Town Commissioners simply decided to do nothing!

Chemical Lists
The application of the regulation is based on, among other things, the presence of listed chemicals at or above a threshold value. See Table 1 for the most common water and wastewater treatment facility chemicals on the Lists. Generally speaking, if you have threshold quantities of the other chemicals from either List, you have a major pretreatment Program and Industrial Wastewater Treatment problem! Congress mandated the presence of chlorine and sulfur dioxide in Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

Program Eligibility
The RMP allows for three levels of action, depending on accident history, presence or absence of public receptors, the status of your emergency planning, your PSM status, and your SIC code. These characteristics determine the eligibility for one of the three Programs. There is an increasing amount of required work as you go from Program 1 to 3. Most probably your facilities will fall into Program 2. Table 2 lays out the basic eligibility requirements for each Program.

Your safety history (including on-site injury or death and off-site damage, injury or death), and the presence of public or environmental receptors within the hazard distances all determine the exact requirements (one of three Programs) that must be met. For example, if there are no Public or Environmental Receptors within the distance that injury could be done by an accidental release, whether toxic or flammable, and you have a clean 5-year safety record you may be eligible for Program 1.

The regulation requires an impressive amount of planning, procedure writing, analysis, and especially documentation. As an example, having the training plan without being able to document the training of your employees will not be sufficient.

Assuming that you have never done the OSHA PSM work, now would be a very good time to start the effort! By the time you read this article it is probably March or April of 1998. You now have less than 18 months. The final date for the electronic submission of the EPA documentation is Midnight, June 20, 1999. If this sounds like plenty of time, remember that you will have to produce these documents, do the modeling and off-site consequences determinations, document all of your actions, and then submit the necessary information to the EPA electronically. On top of all of this, you need to provide yourself with a reality check. More about that later.

The Model
Regardless of the Program that you are in, you will have to do a Worst-Case Analysis. In fact, you have to do some analysis just to determine which Program you are in! Program 1 is based on having no Public Receptors in the Worst-Case radius circle (See Table 2). The analysis can be done with Tables provided by the EPA. These Tables were pre-computed with very conservative assumptions, so the distances tend to the long side of the range.

If you have never dealt with computer modeling before, you must remember that you are working with a mathematical description of complex processes, and they have implicit and explicit assumptions built into them by the modeler. You must know your model, the assumptions in the model and the assumptions that are being made when you use the model and the output. The differences between the different available models can be very eye-opening! On one modeling run, after using the same parameters in four models we got a range of distances of 5.4, 5.6, 7.8, and 11.2 miles. Once you have your worst case radius, draw a circle on a map and see if the public has access, residences, recreational areas, commercial or industrial areas within the circle. The RMP regulation does not differentiate between one and one hundred thousand people potentially exposed.

The population figures are usually available from local planning organizations, and your own Water and Sewer Plan should have population projections. We use the Year 2000 population estimates to guide planning for the 1999 submission date.

The Plan
The planning for the accidental release of hazardous materials will have to take into account your operational schedule (do you have a full staff at each facility 24 hours a day?), the local economy (vacationers, tourists?), capabilities (a volunteer fire company with no HazMat training, your own employees responding from off-site at 3 A.M.?).

Any plan will have to include detection of the release, alarm, response, control, and mitigation.

Your Hazard Analysis should provide guidance about the possible causes and mitigation. Your schedule can guide you about the possible time of occurrence. If you have staff on-site for one shift a day, that leaves 2/3 of the day for problems to occur when no one is around to take action! Do you have detection? Where do your alarms sound? Can you respond to an emergency (what if your access road lies down wind of the release?), can you get there from here? Where is your personal protective apparel, respiratory protective equipment? Will your car work in a cloud of chlorine, or will you have to walk in, can you get helicopter support? Can the responding personnel actually do the required work because of prior training, proper tools and equipment, and physical fitness? The questions go on, and you must answer them!

Reality Check
After you get your Emergency Response Plan together, we at A. & L. Shatto, Inc. very strongly recommend that for anything you plan to do, allow the time to practice it, test it, or do an exercise before you submit the Plan. And you must remember that the time available for testing, training, exercising your Plan, and making the necessary revisions is the first thing you sacrifice by delaying this effort.

You must conduct test exercises to work out all the bugs that will show up. You don't want to have jurisdictional disputes among the responders while standing in a yellow-green cloud with the 6 0'Clock News crew pointing telephoto-lensed cameras at you, from a safe distance. Anyone who has ever prepared a plan can testify that no plan ever survives contact with reality unchanged.

The Public
Once you have made the electronic submission, your information will be available to the whole world on the Internet!

Something that you may also have to start considering is the possibility of a public relations effort. There was a good article on Citizen Advisory Groups in the October 1997 issue of WATER/Engineering & Management Magazine. Working through your Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) is a very good place to start. The LEPC is probably quite experienced in considering the risks and responses involved with hazardous materials. The Committee should be able to assist, and may even take the lead in the education of the public. The public relations and education effort should begin as early in the game as you can manage it.

The investment in time and effort that you make early in the program may reduce the headaches that will result from people suddenly finding that your treatment facility has X tons of highly toxic chemicals and that they are within a distance that may expose them to harm in the event of an accidental release. Trust me, they will find out!

General duty clause
Both Process Safety Management (29 CFR 1910.119) and Risk Management Planning (40 CFR 68) are associated with a General Duty Clause that requires even the exempted facilities to take some action. The General Duty Clause of the Clean Air Act [CAA 112(r)(1)] directs that owners and operators of stationary sources identify hazards that may result from accidental releases, to design and maintain a safe facility, and to minimize the consequences of releases when they occur. The clause applies to any facility that handles any hazardous substance, regardless of the quantity on-site.

If you thought you were absolved by inventory size, you need to guess again! Essentially, you are required to perform much the same actions as an eligible facility, but are exempted only from the submission of an RMP.

Bells and Whistles
Let's assume that you have found yourself eligible for Program 2, despite a flawless safety record, and a previously coordinated Emergency Response Plan. You are eligible for Program 2 because there is a single family residence within the Worst-Case circle (that's all it takes!). Table 3 summarizes the Program requirements. You have the streamlined Program to develop. These documents are available because the OSHA PSM Standard has been around long enough for these things to be "in the can" already. You must do process safety information, hazard review, SOPs, training, maintenance, incident investigation, and a compliance audit component.

Can you go farther? Absolutely, you may! Should you go beyond the minimum requirement of the regulation? We believe that the minimal effort invested in using "canned" generic PSM-related material to produce customized, site-specific plans and programs is well worth the additional cost. The programmatic improvement will contribute to the health and safety of your employees, the safety of the surrounding people you serve, and the environment that we all live in.

The inclusion of mechanical integrity planning will help to systematize your maintenance. A management of change program will require you to think out the potential hazards and benefits to changes, train your employees, and ensure that your RMP is more of a living document than an expensive bookend. Pre-start-up reviews both feed the management of change process and provide a double check before the final switch is thrown. Contractor safety and hot-work permit programs protect you and your contractors by ensuring consistent safety programs and rules understood by all involved. Safety translates to limits on liability! Employee participation will, if done properly, provide a buy-in by the people who will benefit the most, and who must actually take the action. Those are pretty good benefits from a few bells and whistles.

The Pay-Off
When all is said, done, and beamed up, what do you have? At this point, it all depends on your attitude toward plans and procedures. You will have developed a detailed knowledge of your process, an appreciation of the risks to you, your employees, the public around you, and the environment. You have developed alarms, mitigation, response plans, and the preventative measures that, hopefully eliminate the need for a response. Your safety planning, and training should show benefits in reduced accidents and injuries. Outside contractors will hopefully be more careful since they will be aware of your attitude toward safety, and that reduces your liability. What you get from the Risk Management Plan will depend on how you approach it, produce it, and use it.

About the Author
Wade Whitlock is an Associate for Planning, Health, and Environment with A. & L. Shatto, Inc. He performs health and environmental work for the chemical and process engineering firm. He can be contacted at 800.836.8788. Offices are at 336 S. Main St., Ste 2D in Bel Air, MD 21014

Table 1 -- Listed Chemicals and Thresholds
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Table 2 -- Program Eligibility Requirements
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Table 3 -- Program Requirements
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