RIVM Report 2017-0131: The influence of plant aging ('ageing') on the cause of accidents involving hazardous substances

[ Source: RIVM, https://www.rivm.nl/publicaties/aandacht-voor-ageing-binnen-chemische-industrie-bedrijven-over-risicos-als-gevolg-van, 10.21945/RIVM-2017-0131 ]

Summary

The recent European Seveso III Directive has a new focus in Annex 3. This states that companies covered by the directive must pay attention to "the management and control of the risks associated with aging appr equipment installed in the establishment and corrosion. This provision also applies to Dutch Brzo companies because the Brzo 2015 refers directly to the European directive.

This report analyzed the extent to which aging was a (co-)cause of hazardous materials incidents. To this end, incident data available through Storybuilder was used. Storybuilder is an incident analysis tool managed by RIVM. The purpose of this analysis is to give governments and companies insight into how aging can affect the safety of installations.

Neither the Seveso III Directive nor Brzo 2015 provide a definition of "obsolescence. This report has chosen to use the three-part definition of obsolescence as formulated by ESReDA. This definition indicates that aging of an installation is related not only to material degradation of the installation, but also to 'obsolescence' (the disuse of applied techniques) and to obsolescence of organization and systems.

The incident rapporteur (Social Affairs and Employment Inspectorate, I-SZW) rarely mentioned the concept of aging explicitly in the incident reports. Therefore, the incident analysis into aging causes was conducted through a number of intermediate steps in order to detect aging incidents indirectly as well. This ultimately revealed 91 incidents in which aging was (probably) a (co-)cause. The descriptions of these 91 incidents are given in Appendix 2.

In these 91 "aging incidents," either material degradation, obsolescence or aging, or a combination of the ageing[1]aspects were possible causes of the incident. These are further broken down into partial aspects in the report itself.

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Date of publication:

10 July 2018

Format:

PDF

Number of pages:

58

Language:

Dutch

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