Doug,
Thanks for your insightful comments on how to
progress safety in our PSUB community. My terse digestion of your comments
boil down two a few key points:
I for one concur and think we do a lot of this
through the existing forum. There is however, a missing piece, the
independent review.
If you actually try to get your new psub
certified as A1 by ABS, then an independent review of your design would be
conducted by an ABS inspector that would go over every aspect of the design and
then be present for certain milestones of the fabrication and testing.
This normally requires a lot of iterations on the design, were ABS questions an
issue, and designer defends design with technical backup.
The problem is cost. Most psubbers are
willing to follow design guidelines such as ABS the best they can but do not
want to fork out the big bucks that buys the time to conduct the detail
independent review and the onsite monitoring of fabrication and testing.
The part that I see is missing then (assuming you
are not independently wealthy) is the independent safety
review. In the oil and gas industry in the US, they use something called
Process Safety Management (PSM). After the detailed design
work is done but before the design in implemented, a team is brought
together to conduct the Process Safety Review. This team includes
the designer, plus a diverse set of outsiders such
as instrumentation techs, experience operations folks, electricians,
engineers etc. They meet for a day or so and go ever aspect of the design
asking a lot of "what if" questions focused around safety. As an example, for a
process vessel design, someone might ask, what would happen if a
particular control valve stuck, or what happens if a pressure sensor
goes out or what happens if the pressure relief valve fails. These
PSM reviews almost always generate a list of items that need fixing
that the designer just did not think of or was not aware of. A
safer design is almost always the byproduct of this kind of
review.
I toyed with the idea of conducting a Process
Safety Review for my boat after I had completed all the design work and
documentation. I considered flying a few fellow psubbers in for a
weekend to do the review. In the end, I did not follow through as did not
want to pay the expense. What I did in stead was to package all of design
documentation and prints for my boat and send them to a fellow psubber that had
actually built a boat who agreed to review the work. I then, via
email, answered many, many questions over a 3 month period. This feed back
identified several weaknesses in my design that I subsequently addressed in the
final design. While this approach was not as comprehensive as
having ABS involvement and it does not result in an ABS A1 classification
of my boat, it has I think helped in improving the overall design and safety of
my boat.
How did I meet the fellow psubber, of course by
attending a Psubs convention.
Cliff
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