Hazard Identification Studies

HAZID (Hazard Identification) is a qualitative technique for the early identification of potential hazards and threats effecting people, the environment, assets or reputation. The major benefit of a HAZID study is to provide essential input to project development decisions. It is a means of identifying and describing HSE hazards and threats at the earliest practicable stage of a development or venture. The Objective of the study is to identify the potential hazards and to reduce the probability and consequences of an incident in site that would have a detrimental impact to the personnel plant, properties and environment and the Scope of study will depend on the particular project. The study method is a combination of identification, analysis and brainstorming by the HAZID team members. Guidewords are used in order to identify possible potential and hazardous effects as well as threats. Furthermore, the team analyses the appropriate controls that should put in place in order to prevent or control each identified threat. The analysis of HAZID will be conducted on a session basis, grouping the processes with the PFD (Process Flow Diagram) and plant layout into a series of sections where the various sources will have similar characteristics and hence consequences. The benefits of the study are to:

Identify opportunities for inherent safety.

Any special preparations required to be taken to handle these can be pre – planned.

Methods to Identify Hazards

Hazard Identification Checklist

A good and easy-to-fill-out hazard identification checklist can go a long way to encouraging and normalizing the process of identifying hazards as they appear. A good hazard identification checklist will be comprehensive enough to ensure the person filling out the form is doing the necessary checks, but also lean and short enough to encourage them to do it without doing too much admin.

Conduct Pre-Start Discussions

At the end of the day, the smartest and easiest way to reduce incidents in the workplace is to make people more conscious and aware of what they are doing. Conducting pre-start discussions allows everyone to talk about what might go right or wrong, what other people have encountered when working on this before (together people have seen and identified more hazards) and to bring awareness to the job being done today.

Recognize Hazards at Workplace

A great way to ensure this attitude doesn’t propagate throughout organization to openly encourage to be as proactive as possible, and that identifying a hazard is never a waste of time. If encouragement doesn’t work, then also test incentivizing and gamifying some of your safety processes e.g., give a recognition to the person who identifies the hazards.

Safety inspections and Audit

Regular safety inspections and audits helps you take notice of the environment. When you walk around and actively look for problems and hazards, they often arise. There’s no need to do full audits once a week, but having a regular cadence for your safety inspections and audits ensures you are picking up all of the obvious hazards in your workplace.

Monitoring Work Environment

Some hazards need more specific and detailed monitoring. Noise & vibration monitoring and other environmental safety monitoring activities bring to light not easily visible hazards which are often overlooked and ignored. Setting up regular testing periods ensures tracking the more easily ignored hazards which can be slower, but just as damaging.

Past Incidents And Reports

To get a regular flow of hazard incident reports it is important to action them in order to prevent future occurrence. The act of identifying a hazard isn’t enough; someone needs to take required action. It is good practice to go through past hazards and hazard identification forms to make sure you didn’t miss anything and look for patterns in the reporting.