Designing Safety Regulations for High-Hazard Industries (2018) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 5-21
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From page 5... ...
Other regulations target incidents that occur much less frequently but that can lead to numerous deaths and injuries and severe environmental damage, such as airliner crashes, marine tanker spills, mine collapses, capsizings of ferries, and chemical plant explosions. Ascertaining the level of safety improvement caused by regulations intended to prevent the latter incidents can be difficult because changes in the risk of low-frequency, high-consequence events, which are rare to begin with, are seldom discernible from incident data, and other potentially relevant data on near misses may not be available (Carrigan and Coglianese 2012)
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From page 6... ...
6 DESIGNING SAFETY REGULATIONS FOR HIGH-HAZARD INDUSTRIES TABLE 1-1 Examples of Federal Agencies Having Safety and Health Regulatory Responsibilities Agency Department Safety and Health Regulatory Purview Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Interior Offshore energy facilities Consumer Product Safety Commission Independent Consumer products Federal Aviation Administration Transportation Airports, aircraft, airlines, and air traffic operations Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Transportation Commercial motor vehicle operations Federal Railroad Administration Transportation Freight and passenger rail Federal Transit Administration Transportation Public transportation Food and Drug Administration Health and Human Services Food, drugs, medical devices, tobacco, and cosmetics Food Safety and Inspection Service Agriculture Meat, poultry, and eggs Mine Safety and Health Administration Labor Mines National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Transportation Motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment Nuclear Regulatory Commission Independent Nuclear reactors, nuclear materials, and radioactive waste Occupational Safety and Health Administration Labor Workplaces Office of Air and Radiation, Office of Water, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Office of Land and Emergency Management U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Air, water, radiation, chemical safety and pollution, and toxic and solid waste Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration Transportation Gas and hazardous liquid pipelines and hazardous cargoes U.S.
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From page 7... ...
1 In the mid-1990s, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) , which preceded the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, began encouraging offshore operators to follow American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 75 for creating safety management programs.
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. The previous regulatory approach had been criticized for contributing to a "compliance mind-set" among offshore operators intent on meeting a "checklist" of narrowly prescribed actions (Bennear 2015; Deepwater Horizon Study Group 2011; NAE and NRC 2012)
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The guidance is intended to support the development of more comprehensive systems to manage safety through integrity management as well as operating procedures, employee training, emergency preparedness, Box 1-1 System-Level Risks Interest in organizational safety planning and management programs is, in part, a response to a growing consensus that trivial, unplanned events occur all the time but occasionally can lead to disasters. Charles Perrow (1984)
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From page 10... ...
Under these circumstances, the regulator may favor a regulatory regime consisting of many highly focused requirements that target individual risks with specific means of control, as is characteristic of BSEE's and PHMSA's traditional regulations. Alternatively, if the nature of the problem is such that many risk factors arise from the diversity and complexity of the industry's facilities and operations, the regulator may conclude, as BSEE and PHMSA did, that a regime consisting of many specific regulatory commands will not be sufficient.
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. "Rather than a specific organization of roles and learning processes or measurable set of attitudes and beliefs," safety culture is understood as an aspirational goal to be achieved, however difficult and elusive, and "often only one of a number of competing organizational objectives" (Silbey 2009, 356)
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From page 12... ...
BSEE and PHMSA have concluded that requirements for SEMS and integrity management programs are essential in controlling the risks in the industries they oversee. Both agencies have had to address compliance challenges arising from a regulatory design that gives operators flexibility to craft and execute their risk management programs.
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From page 13... ...
In those countries, regulators had supplemented their traditional regulatory regimes with requirements for oil and gas companies to establish customized safety management systems to control the diverse risks arising from the design and operation of their offshore facilities. PHMSA was persuaded that because many of the hazardous liquid and gas pipeline systems it oversees are similarly varied in their design, configuration, operations, and environmental setting, they too could benefit from a regulatory approach that emphasizes more context-specific risk management.
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From page 14... ...
Performance-based regulation is usually contrasted with "prescriptive" regulation -- sometimes called specification, design, or technology standards -- that requires firms to adopt specific means to promote safety and reduce risks. This study will compare the advantages and disadvantages of prescriptive- and performance-based forms of safety regulation and identify possible opportunities for, and constraints on, making greater use of the latter.
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, or efficiency and equity considerations.4 However, regardless of the criterion used, a regulatory objective can be selected independently of regulatory design choices. For example, if the objective of a regulation is to reduce the risk of an activity by 50 percent or by 90 percent, the regulator in either case could prescribe the use of specific technologies expected to achieve the desired reduction level, or it could impose a mandatory performance standard and require that regulated entities achieve the desired reductions through any means they choose.
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From page 16... ...
federal and state levels and Canada's federal level, representatives from North American pipeline companies, offshore oil and gas regulators from the United States and countries in the North Sea region, and representatives from the offshore oil and gas industries in the United States and the North Sea region. Participants are acknowledged in the Preface.
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From page 17... ...
. A fundamental difference is that regulations that require management programs are seldom accompanied by mandates that the programs achieve specified safety outcomes, such as keeping pipeline failures or offshore incidents below a defined frequency.
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From page 18... ...
The four case studies that are provided -- drawn from the regulation of the pipeline and offshore oil and gas sectors -- are intended to illustrate the conceptual framework adopted by the committee and the array of implementation, compliance, and enforcement issues that accompany regulation design types applied in different high-hazard industries under different conditions. The case studies also offer insight into why some regulatory regimes have evolved as they have -- for example, by relying to varying degrees on one or more regulatory design types.
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The discussion shows how commonly held views of the advantages and disadvantages of design types -- whether characterized as "prescriptive," "performance-based," or something else -- can be overly generalized and potentially misleading as a guide for making regulatory choices suited to particular problems and conditions. In response to the sponsor's interest in the use of regulations that require management programs to ensure safety in high-hazard industries, Chapter 5 more closely examines conditions that can affect the use of these regulations in this context.
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From page 20... ...
2012. Macondo Well Deepwater Horizon Blowout: Lessons for Improving Offshore Drilling Safety.
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From page 21... ...
2000. Final Rule: Pipeline Safety: Pipeline Integrity Management in High Consequence Areas (Hazardous Liquid Operators with 500 or More Miles of Pipeline)
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