Health and Safety Executive

Introduction

Background

To support its statutory role in enforcing offshore health and safety legislation the HSE must maintain its position at the technical forefront of fire and explosion issues. This document presents the strategy areas identified developed by the Offshore Division to address fire and explosion issues on offshore installations.  It summarises the current position with regard to knowledge of fire and explosion hazards and their mitigation, identifies areas of uncertainty and sets out the potential actions required to address significant areas of uncertainty.  The prioritisation of specific strategy topics is subject to continuous change and is not addressed in this document.  Not all identified strategy issues will be carried forward at this time.

Objectives and scope of work

The overall objective of the document is to identify the areas which OSD has identified as requiring possible future work to address significant areas of uncertainty in fire and explosion issues on offshore installations.

The topics covered in this document are:

  • source terms;
  • ignition;
  • fire and gas detection;
  • dispersion and ventilation;
  • fire and explosion hazard assessment;
  • fire and explosion consequence assessment; and
  • prevention, control and mitigation of fires and explosion.

The detailed scope of work is as follows:

  1. provide an introduction to each topic area, e.g. describing the scope of the review, the nature of the hazard etc (as appropriate to the topic area);
  2. describe the significance of the topic with regard to the risk of major accidents on offshore installations;
  3. summarise current knowledge of the topic (i.e. reference to completed and on-going research, standards, codes of practice, design guidance etc);
  4. summarise existing modelling capabilities (as appropriate to the topic area);
  5. based on the results of (iii) and (iv) above, identify areas of uncertainty;
  6. summarise current industry practice (i.e. reference to approaches taken in Safety Cases, extent of implementation of existing codes, guidance etc, awareness of issues);
  7. summarise areas identified to potentially be carried forward as part of OSD 3's strategy development.

The prioritisation of specific strategy topics is subject to continuous change and is not addressed in this document.

Directgov - Business Link

Updated 09.06.09