2022 Mary Kay O'Connor Safety & Risk Conference - SDN Keynote address
From Oct. 5 to 7, the 2022 Mary Kay O'Connor Safety & Risk Conference was held. The event was organized by the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center, which is part of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
There were nearly 300 participants at the conference, drawn from industry and science.
Presentations at the conference included 5 plenary Keynote speeches and more than 100 scientific papers.
Arjan van Dijk gave one of the keynote speeches, titled: Improving Loss Prevention through alliance between industry, government and science.
Main points of this speech:
- Although significant incidents are rare, there has been no clear reduction in the number of serious incidents involving hazardous substances at Dutch Seveso companies over the past 10 years. Nor is there a measurable reduction in non-compliance with regulations or reported unusual occurrences. There are still shortcomings in the implementation of risk control measures.
- Despite annual reporting by industry and regulators on safety performance up to the level of the House of Representatives and independent investigations into serious incidents, only a minority of people believe that industry and regulators communicate openly, honestly and in a timely manner about safety. Lack of trust makes people feel unsafe.
- Other ways of sharing knowledge and networking can improve safety performance faster. This requires more trust and cooperation between industry and government, with support from science.
- The Safety Delta Netherlands (SDN), a partnership between government, industry and science, was established to stimulate further safety improvements in Dutch Seveso companies through structural cooperation. The ambition is ZERO serious incidents involving hazardous substances.
- Four themes have been selected as a framework for all activities of the SDN. Knowledge collections are developed for the current topics of each SDN theme. Networking between Dutch Seveso companies is stimulated, for example, by deploying 'knowledge brokers' and organising network events. To drive safety innovations, 19 research questions have been formulated and a top 5 has been selected to convert into projects. With the participation of the business community, government and science, a number of (small) projects from the SDN project funnel are now in progress. These will result in new knowledge that can be implemented by industry.
