Presenter Background:
Richard is a Professional Engineer with over 15 years of functional safety experience. He has facilitated over 700 days of Process Hazards Analysis studies, such as HAZOP and LOPA, for a wide variety of process types and clients, including some of the largest operating and engineering companies in North America. He is an engaging and effective training instructor in Process Safety Management and PHA Facilitation.
Richard is passionate about understanding and preventing hazardous incidents to ensure that everyone gets to go home safely to their friends and family. He is enthusiastic about learning from and sharing lessons learned and best practices, and has written papers for and presented at previous GCPS conferences, and at the IChemE Hazards conference. He is a member of the CSChE Process Safety Management Division and the Energy Safety Canada Community of Practice.
Richard is certified as a Functional Safety Engineer in Process Hazards and Risk Analysis (TÜV Rheinland) and as an exida Functional Safety Practitioner, and holds a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alberta.
Richard is currently a Senior Functional Safety Engineer at Watchmen Instrumented Safety Experts in Calgary, Canada.
Abstract:
The OceanGate Titan submersible vessel was lost during an expedition in June 2023 to visit the wreck of RMS Titanic, which rests 3,800 metres below sea level. At this depth, the pressure is over 350 times that at sea level. During this expedition, the vessel walls failed and the submersible imploded, killing all five people aboard, including OceanGate’s CEO.
There are process safety lessons that can be learned from this incident that are directly applicable to the processing industry, especially when innovating and developing new processes, equipment, materials or procedures. This paper will identify those lessons and discuss how they can be incorporated to prevent similar events occurring in your process, including connecting these findings to the CSA Z767 elements of Process Safety Management.
Innovation is at the heart of the processing industry, and by analyzing this incident we can learn lessons to help continue that drive going forward into the future – safely.