2024 Mar-Apr RETA Breeze

Obviously, the answers to all of these questions should tell us whether we need to adjust our staffing levels and/or increase the amount of services we ask contractors to complete for us. Could you choose to use a security guard on off shifts or holiday coverage to make roving patrols and report abnormal conditions and alarms? Sure, but that also means that guard has to be trained to identify what the alarms mean, how to identify an abnormal condition, and that they know what to do to either immediately correct the deviation or immediately contact someone that can (on call techs or service providers). By the time you have invested this much into a guard, you could have paid for a well-qualified operator. My advice to any organization when making these decisions is to evaluate the above and take into consideration that attracting well rounded operators with the skill sets and experience often sought is more often through word of mouth about how the organization projects their Process Safety culture. BUILDING A DEFENSIBLE CASE ON STAFFING Ok, we’ve answered our questions and gathered a good impression of where we stand – and where we should stand. Where should we document this? In our opinion, the place in the system where the facility already had the opportunity to address this issue, was in the PHA. So, let’s go back to the PHA, end see if our results match the PHA team’s.

equivalents) from the standard Human Factors section of the IIAR What-If /Checklist worksheets: HF14.37 - What if an employee is stressed due to shift work and overtime schedules? HF14.38 - What if there are not sufficient employees to properly operate the system and respond to system upsets? During the PHA, the facility should have answered those in a way that says they have adequate staffing or recommended that staffing be increased. Let’s say you decided that you had adequate staffing based on your answers to the questions above. If that’s the case, we’d expect to see something like the following:

If, however, we found some areas for improvement, we might expect something like this:

Closing Thoughts: We hope you didn’t start reading this hoping for an easy answer, but we’re fairly certain – now that you understand the full scope of the question you were asked – that the answer doesn’t need to be easy, it needs to be correct and defensible.

You are going to be looking for the following two questions (or their

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