In risk assessment, how you determine the risk and locate it can count as much or more than the risk itself. After all, the risk you don’t know or can’t figure out is usually the one that is most dangerous. And not all risks are obvious; safety officers and safety committees make their money by doing the work to find those risks that are hidden, only to be found with a proper risk assessment.
Revisiting Risk Assessment
Bruce Lyon and Georgi Popov collaborated on an article in the March 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, writing about risk assessments and discussing how our traditional models of charting risk can and should be modified and even combined in order to develop new angles of observation so more risk is brought out from hiding.
I have been looking into this article, beginning the dissection of the steps that go into turning the science of risk assessment into an art form. We set the stage for this blog post today, which covers the second step of the risk-assessment process. The last post was about establishing criteria and the context for measuring risk and finding them in various situations. Now, we talk about where the rubber meets the road – selecting the right assessment method and an effective way to use it to determine the risks in a particular industry.
Finding the Right Method
If you are reading this, chances are you are a safety professional who has at least a passing familiarity with ANSI Z690.3. At first glance, it can be a daunting part of ANSI standards. As part of the standard, there are two tables that consist of 31 different risk-assessment methodologies, or tools in your risk assessment toolbox, from which you can choose to do your risk assessment.
These are not one-size-fits-all; they are each geared for certain industries or companies, and even then they are more generally applied across all companies in a particular vertical or a particular industry. But as most companies are like snowflakes – unique in some respect – it is hard to imagine that any one of these 31 different methodologies, in their purest state, will actually do the most effective job at assessing risk in your particular situation.
When considering what tool to use for your particular context, the sound advice is to go as simple as you can and build from there. If the methodology you choose is complex or has a lot of moving parts to it, it will be tough to modify it to fit your needs, and if it is too complex in the first place, some things may get missed and you might lose some effectiveness as well for that reason.
Keeping it simple makes it easy to customize the chosen methodology to fit what is needed, and oftentimes simplicity is what can provide the most useful information because the methodology is no longer distracting and thus it gets out of the way of the assessment.
Risk Assessment Case Study
To finish this post, I will look into a case study that Lyon and Popov put forth in their article, demonstrating the choosing of a particular risk-assessment tool and modifying it to fit a particular risky situation so all the risks that more effectively evaluated. This case study was about a risk assessment of winery chemicals using a preliminary hazard analysis, or PHA.
In this case study, a winery wanted use a 100-percent concentration of sulphur dioxide for use in dosing large tanks to prevent yeast and other microbes from growing and potentially spoiling the wine. The idea was to cut costs and use less in order to do effective dosing.
Sulphur dioxide in any concentration will present health and safety issues for workers, whether as a gas or in a liquid state. The biggest risk were to those in the bottling line, who were most exposed to any possible leaks or releases. The standard for allowable exposure is to sulphur dioxide is 2 parts per million, with 100 ppm serving as a “lethal” exposure level. Complicating matters was that the bottling area is lacking in adequate ventilation for sulphur dioxide at that high of a concentration.
A couple of issues were resolved here in the risk-assessment process, using the PHA and job hazard analysis (JHA) in concert. One possible outcome is what is called a bow tie analysis, which can look at the various risks in this situation and provide various levels of control in order to mitigate the risks.
What happened in this case was that the 100-percent sulfur dioxide was exchanged for a 6-percent solution, along with potassium meta-bisulfite. Ultimately, the safety of the workers was more important than the cost-cutting, and the winery owners had to be shown the risks of their decision though a PHA/JHA hybrid methodology to bring it all to light in an understandable way.
Of course, the point here is to encourage safety officers to open their minds and be willing to mix and match pieces of the different risk-assessment tools available. Determining how to approach a risk assessment doesn’t have to be an either-or transaction among the 31 different methodologies available; it could be an “and” scenario. Be willing to do a little trial and error with each of the tools, determining the risks you are assessing and the context. The context may very well be the key to selecting the right tool and the best modification to achieve your goal.
For more, you can check out Lyon and Popov’s article in the March 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine by checking out the ASSE website.