How important are human factors when carrying out risk assessment studies such as HAZOP, LOPA and other techniques? Very much important it turns out, although until now most practitioners did not include this factor in their risk assessment studies. But of course we know that accidents can and do happen due to human error. Is there a policy guideline for this in place? Yes, it turns out that there is, in fact it was released a long time ago.
The UK Health and Safety Executive reportedly is mulling to include a "human" factor in risk assessment of major hazard facilities (COMAH). They have released a policy roadmap that details this here.
For example if the Risk assessmnet of a major hazard facility shows that it is essential to carry out some maintenance tasks regularly to reduce the risks, then a human factors analysis should be done to find out if
a) whether the task itself could be skipped?
b) whether any alarms can be raised if this is skipped due to error, negligence or simply laziness?
c) whether an incompetent performance of this task could result in an accident?
Very valid questions and a long way to go to analyze all the myriad things that humans can and many times actually do wrong!
So in your next HAZOP review one of the deviations should be "operator did not perform the task at all OR he did not perform the task correctly". This condition has not been included in any HAZOP formats or software to the best of our knowledge but should be and will, in the near future.
If you would like to know more about this aspect, you can check out the Abhisam course here.
