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Offshore Oil&Gas fluid production installations may be the target of intentional malicious acts (security attacks) carried out by adversaries of different nature and different motivations which may generate major events with severe consequences on workers, the environment and the property. The current study reviews the state of the art concerning the security of Offshore Oil&Gas operations, which is typically addressed according to best practices and qualitative or semi-quantitative methods. However, systematic approaches or guidelines in support of the analysis are still lacking. The current study investigates the possibility of using Adversary Sequence Diagrams (ASDs) as Security Vulnerability/Risk Assessment (SVA/SRA) supporting tools. A case study addressing a fixed Offshore Oil&Gas fluid production platform proved the ability of ASDs to provide credible attack modes within the Physical Protection System (PPS) that the adversaries have to perform in order to accomplish their objectives, as well as the security barriers that can potentially be effective in delaying and detecting the attacks, which are information required by SVA/SRA studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the efficiency of emergency rescue in transportation accidents of hazardous materials(HAZMAT), a Bayesian network(BN) was developed in this paper to estimate the accident handling time. Also, based on this BN, the difficulty of handling every types of accidents can be quantified. According to theoretical analysis and literature review, 7 nodes (season, time, type of road, type of HAZMAT, the former accident, the secondary accident and handling time) are used to set up the BN. The value of mutual information was calculated to refine the BN. A database of 902 transportation accident of HAZMAT cases was built up for Bayesian parameter learning. Based on the parameter learning of BN, the results were summarized as follow: (1) The BN could be used to estimate the probabilities of handling time in different periods which include ‘0 to 2 hours’, ‘2 to 4 hours’, ‘4 hours and more’. (2) The difficulty of each type of accident can be ordered as follow: rollover> rear-end> internal fault≈ impact> falling> tire fault> vehicle body fire. Leakage>combustion explosion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the Hungarian system for industrial safety has a history of 15 years. The aim of this article is to overview the measures related to the development of the legislative area for industrial safety in the field of dangerous goods transportation and draw upon the potential experiences of this progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process safety, as well as the safe storage and transportation of hazardous or reactive chemicals, has been a topic of increasing interest in the last few decades. The increased interest in improving the safety of operations has been driven largely by a series of recent catastrophes that have occurred in the United States and the rest of the world. A continuous review of past incidents and disasters to look for common causes and lessons is an essential component to any process safety and loss prevention program. While analyzing the causes of an accident cannot prevent that accident from occurring, learning from it can help to prevent future incidents. The objective of this article is to review a selection of major incidents involving ammonium nitrate in the last century to identify common causes and lessons that can be gleaned from these incidents in the hopes of preventing future disasters. Ammonium nitrate has been involved in dozens of major incidents in the last century, so a subset of major incidents were chosen for discussion for the sake of brevity. Twelve incidents are reviewed and ten lessons from these incidents are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These days it is especially important, and a complex task at the same time, to protect human health and the environment at a high level. One of the most important elements of this protection policy is industrial safety, highlighted by the major accidents of recent years. Industrial safety embraces four special fields: the supervision of dangerous plants, the control of the transportation of dangerous goods, the protection of critical infrastructure and the prevention of nuclear accidents. In our essay we dedicate our attention firstly to the assessment of the international and national legal regulations concerning the emergency p1anning of the railway's dangerous activities. Secondly, the main goal of this article is to analyse the implementation of the above mentioned regulations by the operators of Hungarian railway infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A study of 1932 accidents that occurred during the transport of hazardous substances by road and rail from the beginning of the 20th century to July 2004 was carried out. The results obtained show an increase in the frequency of accidents over time. More than half of the accidents happened on roads (63%). The most frequent accidents were releases (78%), followed by fires (28%), explosions (14%) and gas clouds (6%). The various causes of the accidents, the type of substance involved and the consequences for the population (number of people killed, injured or evacuated) were also analysed. Among the diverse measures taken to improve this situation, the training of professional people involved in transportation seems to be of major importance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In 1998 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) launched the Convention Project on Chemical Safety in developing countries. The project aims to support developing countries in the implementation of the Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, create human resources and institutional capacities and to demonstrate via pilot measures how chemical safety in the partner countries can be improved and sustainably implemented in line with international standards. With this objective the development of a Chemical Management Guide (CM Guide) for small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries has been initiated. The guide describes a step-by-step approach which is based on identifying ‘hot-spots’ as a first step, and making a chemical inventory as a second step. The third step is the continuous improvement of chemical management. In total, there are six tools that aim to support the chemical management process: basic concepts for risk assessment; description of control approaches; using material safety data sheets (MSDSs); risk phrases for hazardous substances; safety phrases for hazardous substances; symbols used for labelling hazardous substances. In the course of the test-implementation of the CM Guide in Indonesia, it was found that MSDSs were not available in most of the smaller companies. In contrast, medium-sized and larger companies do have more MSDSs available. It was also found that the way to engage the minds of company owners and managers is with economic arguments related to the loss, waste and expiry of materials, and quality standards expected from importing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers two new decision-making problems in the context of transporting hazardous materials (HM). These problems are motivated by the fact that many practical situations only have a finite number of shipments of HM to be made and that shipments are likely to be suspended after a threshold number of accidents. Both problems are nonlinear, constrained shortest path problems. Exact solution methods are proposed and computational results are reported for the case where the threshold number of accidents is one. Extension of the methodology for higher values of the threshold number of accidents is also outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents trends and developments affecting the emergency management sector in the U.S. Decision of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to issue a final rule that deletes references to outdated industry and national consensus standards; Plan of the Transportation Security Administration to launch its HazMat Truck Security Pilot designed to enhance security for the transportation of hazardous materials; Nomination of Edwin G. Foulke Jr. as head of OSHA.

The article reports on the changes in the registration policy of the Hazardous Materials Emergency Preparedness (HMEP) Grants Program. This program was established by the U.S. Department of Transportation Research and Special Programs Administration in order to fund community planning and training in response to chemical spills and other hazardous materials emergencies. The changes in the program's registration, which will now be required for anyone who transports hazardous materials, will help increase funding for emergency planning and training activities.