Washington state updates decades-old rules on refinery safety

Tumwater, WA — Process safety management-focused updates to Washington state’s workplace safety rules for petroleum refineries are set to go into effect Dec. 27.

Process safety management helps ensure processes, people and equipment all work together to reduce risk at facilities that use or manufacture highly hazardous chemicals.

In 2010, seven workers were killed when a heat exchanger catastrophically failed during a maintenance operation, leading to an explosion and fire at the former Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, WA.

The updated rules include:

• Performing reviews to identify the most effective ways to control a hazard.
• Conducting regular reviews of processes that are likely to damage or wear down equipment.
• Planning and analysis to prioritize risks according to the danger they create, then identifying and documenting effective safety measures.
• Incorporating consideration of human factors such as staffing levels and turnover, training, fatigue, and task complexity.
• Conducting root cause analyses after significant incidents.

The updated rules were forged with input from refinery operators, worker advocates, community advocates and other stakeholders, a press release from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries states. The agency also conducted four public hearings and accepted public input on the final rules.

“Refineries have to proactively eliminate and reduce risk – not just react,” Craig Blackwood, assistant director of the Washington L&I Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said in the release. “It has been decades since these rules were updated, and we know the capability of the industry to make these safety changes has improved during that time, so our rules needed to improve as well.”

In a separate release, the Chemical Safety Board commends the state for updating its rules while noting that Washington L&I implemented most of the board’s recommendations to improve PSM after its investigation of the Tesoro incident.