Page 96 - Occupational Health & Safety, July/August 2019

EHS COMPLIANCE
How Mechanical Integrity Inspections Can Help Meet OH&S Goals
Everything wears out eventually. Our work can help determine when that “eventually” might be—the operational life expectancy. BY KEITH TAYLOR
Many OH&S professionals are accustomed to push-back from other departments in their organization when they suggest that a piece of equipment is unsafe and
must be taken out of service. Operations people get concerned about meeting their production targets, the sales department is worried about shipping on time to a valued customer, and accounting gets upset about the lost revenue.
The OH&S professional has worked hard to devel- op a culture of safety awareness and an understanding that operating safely is one of the company’s primary goals. Every facility owner wants knowledgeable, at- tentive employees who are empowered to stop work if they feel an unsafe condition exists. In order to reduce risk and gain support from the other stakeholders in the company, equipment shutdowns must be based on recognized and accepted good engineering practice.
You can gain this through working with external mechanical integrity inspectors in a strategic way. This article gives the view of a mechanical integrity inspector who has worked with many OH&S profes- sionals to help keep workplaces safe.
Helping to Meet Your Company’s
Regulatory Obligations
As inspectors, the most frequent reason we get called in is due to the need for regular professional inspec- tions to meet federal, state, or local safety regulations. This could be OSHA’s process safety management, EPA’s spill prevention control and countermeasures, or a state-regulated storage tank program. These in- spections can cover a wide range of issues, depending on what’s being inspected—a pressure vessel, a storage tank, a pipeline, a boiler, or another piece of equip- ment. So each inspection is different in terms of what we’re looking for, based on the type of equipment and the requirements of the regulatory standard that we are using.
We can do our work most effectively, allowing your operations to return to normal as soon as pos- sible, if:
■ Any equipment that needs to be taken out of service for inspection has been shut down, locked out, and isolated for safety, particularly if it is a piece of equipment that we will need to enter in order to per- form the inspection.
■ Equipment that is excessively hot or cold has been given time to reach a workable temperature.
■ Obstructive coatings of oil, product residue, ice buildup, or other material, etc., have been cleaned to permit an unobstructed evaluation of the equipment.
Specifications for the equipment are available, including manufacturer’s data report, construction drawings, and details about previous inspections and repair history.
Here’s why that last point matters. Consider, for example, a pressure vessel rated for 200 psi of inter- nal pressure. We’ll calculate the minimum thickness of the shell and the heads and determine whether there is still adequate thickness and that it is not cor- roded away below the standard required. But in order to perform those calculations, we need to know the strength of the material from which it was built. If we don’t have the original drawings to indicate that this was built out of a given type of steel, we will need to make conservative assumptions.
As a result, we may need to report that, based on available information, that piece of equipment isn’t fit for service. However, if we knew that the material was a higher-strength steel, and we could confirm that, then we could say (provided other conditions are met)
90 Occupational Health & Safety | JULY/AUGUST 2019
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IMAGE COURTESY OF ENCORUS GROUP