Safety Case Assessment and Realignment with Operational Status

Our Safety & Risk Engineering team were assigned to update the Operator’s Safety Case for the five-yearly submission to the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety (DMIRS)

Asset:

Operating platforms, plugged and abandoned platforms, suspended platforms awaiting abandonment and suspended platforms that may be restarted in future

What did we do?

1. Reviewed the existing Safety Case and determined the required Safety Case contents and structure based on the operational status of the facilities within the scope
2. Conducted a Management of Change (MoC) gap assessment, including review of change management controls, audits, etc and provided optimal change management recommendations
3. Facilitated a 2-day Safety Case and As Low as Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) Review workshop to:
   1. Review the hazards, Major Accident Events (MAEs) and associated control measures in the existing Hazard Register to ensure they reflect the current operational status of the facility
   2. Re-risk ranked the hazards based on the Operator’s Risk Matrix
   3. Assessed the hazards and determined if risks continue to be ALARP and will satisfy current DMIRS requirements
4. Updated the Hazard Register based on the outcomes of the Safety Case and ALARP Review Workshop
5. Updated the MAE bowtie diagrams
6. Prepared a Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) Impact Technical Note to assess changes in the preceding five years that affected the outcomes of the supporting FSA studies
7. Restructured and updated the Operator’s Safety Case
8. Reviewed and provided recommendations for the update of the Operator’s Safety Management System (SMS) Addendum (which forms Part III of the Safety Case) to ensure alignment with the other parts of the Safety Case and meet regulatory compliance.

What is a Safety Case?

A safety case is a document produced by the operator of a facility which:

• Identifies the hazards and risks
• Describes how the risks are controlled
• Describes the safety management system in place to ensure the controls are effectively and consistently applied
• Safety cases must be produced by the operator of an installation
• The safety case must identify the safety critical aspects of the facility, both technical and managerial
• Appropriate performance standards must be defined for the operation of the safety critical aspects
• The workforce must be involved
• The safety case is produced in the knowledge that it will be scrutinized by a competent and independent regulator

Why we were contracted

Our safety and risk management specialists have the required expertise and experience to complete Safety Case revisions that ensure regulatory compliance which was not available within the clients existing team.