Towards effective management of major hazard facilities

The operators of Major Hazard Facilities (MHFs) have paramount obligation to provide a safe working environment as well as to prevent major accidents. An ongoing research by the authors aims to study specific legislative requirements for the prevention of major accidents in Australia, UK, EU and US with the intent to identify whether they adequately address the prevention of major accidents. Eight major accident cases were selected based on size, consequence and the estimated cost of the accident. Four out of five examples present accidents from the petrochemical industry. The common root causes of accidents across all five examples were compared against common legislation requirements to determine the degree in which legislation addresses the prevention of major accidents. The research methods primarily include extensive literature reviews (e.g. legislations, regulatory arrangements) and knowledge-mining from case-studies on major accidents. The discussions in this paper include: (a) a basic comparison of legislative/ regulatory arrangements for MHFs in industrialised countries (e.g. Australia, UK, US, Europe); (b) brief discussion on goal-setting vs prescriptive legislation and (c) a snapshot summary of lessons learned from case-studies on major accidents