Process Safety ManagementPSM

Process Safety Management is the OSHA framework (29 CFR 1910.119) for preventing catastrophic releases of highly hazardous chemicals. It applies when an on-site quantity of a listed chemical exceeds its threshold, and it sets 14 interlocking elements: employee participation, process safety information, process hazard analysis, operating procedures, training, contractors, pre-startup safety review, mechanical integrity, hot work permit, management of change, incident investigation, emergency planning and response, compliance audits, and trade secrets.

The 14 elements are an interlocking system, not a checklist. MOC without PHA re-validation lets a change weaken a safeguard no one re-examined. Mechanical integrity without MOC lets a replacement-in-kind slip into a change no one documented. Compliance audits every three years are the only element on a fixed clock; the rest run continuously and depend on each other. Non-compliance is expensive — Willful citations carry per-instance penalties in the millions — but the real cost is the incident the system was built to prevent. See HAZOP, MOC, PSSR, and SIL.