Process Safety—An Engineering Achievement

Abstract

Up to the late 1960s the chemical industry looked upon safety as a non-technical subject but after a number of serious accidents technical people with production experience began to be appointed as safety advisers. There had been so little systematic thinking that it was not difficult for them to make improvements such as: the development of systematic methods, now widely used, for identifying and assessing hazards, the development of inherently safer designs (in contrast, the industry has been slower to adopt this change), the development of a new attitude towards human error. These, and other, changes produced a dramatic improvement in the industry's accident rate and raised the reputation of the subject to today's level. The 1980s were a period of consolidation rather than innovation. Finally, we look ahead to the 1990s.