Proposal for an integrated safety and security management system for Seveso plants

After the critical facts of the 11th of September 2001 and some more recent which occurred both in some facilities and pipelines determined by terrorist attacks, industrial vision of safety for industrial plants, and Risk Analysis has changed and has new duties to consider. Aspects and problems concerning security must be included in the overall safety analysis path, and evaluation of the threats and new parameters as attractiveness, vulnerability and reachability of a target – assumed as centre of danger: storages, process unit, transport and convey units – must be included in the definition of the risk for the plant unit. For some plant, both for those of large multinational company, security is now a key priority. This paper proposes an approach for implementing a Safety and Security Management System (SSMS) taking into account all the characteristics required for Safety Management Systems as indicated in the 82/501/CE Directive also known as Seveso III.Anew overall parameter is introduced to estimate the criticality of a target considering different parameters as its vulnerability, attractiveness, reachability and worst-case scenario approach (intentional attacks are considered to produce catastrophic scenarios involving all the confined substance of a unit or storage). The procedure presents an easy implementation by knowing the main results of risk analysis. It is also possible to give gross evaluations even without knowing the results of risk analysis contained in the Safety Report, a mandatory requirement for dangerous plants. This short-cut evaluation provides useful information for ranking interventions and countermeasures, and to focus on security items within the plant. The SSMS is conceived with a PDCA approach (including the ISO 14001:2004, ISO 16017 and OHSAS 18001:1999 schemes), it includes the organizational structure and all the process and resources for determining and implementing the major accident prevention policy considering both the safety and the security issues. This paper is intended to analyze and give methods to build a SSMS including methods for the identification and evaluation of major hazards, to improve the operation control and the active monitoring of the attractive targets. A test case will be presented and an application of the method will show the importance of the results achieved and the real possibilities of application and integration with SMS of Seveso plants