2.3 INHERENT SAFETY
The Platform facilities have been designed such that they are inherently safe, i.e. that the hazards have been designed out or that their consequences are no longer a threat to personnel. Where residual hazards remain, their consequences should be controlled as far as practicable, with automatic or passive systems that do not rely on operator intervention.
An inherently safe design is one where the hazards have been minimized and the likelihood and severity of potential accident events have been reduced as far as is reasonably practicable. The Platform development has been approached with a view to providing inherently safe facilities. To do this the following has always be considered:
• adopt the approach of providing a simple, minimum facilities design;
• simplify the process design;
• minimise flammable and toxic inventories;
• minimise the number of leak sources such as instrument connections, flanged joints, pipe lengths, control valves etc.;
• select more reliable equipment instead of using sparing where shown to be a benefit;
• isolate spare or redundant equipment when not in use;
• use high quality and reliable materials and equipment to minimise maintenance and therefore manning;
• use one reliable instrument/equipment item instead of several less reliable ones;
• pay particular attention to avoiding the use of maintenance intensive equipment;
• adopt a risk and reliability based maintenance strategy;
• minimise maintenance visits in hazardous areas by separation of non-hazardous and hazardous equipment;
• optimise equipment layouts with maximum use of natural ventilation;
• segregate personnel from major hazards (e.g. from very HP hydrocarbon systems);
• consider flow of personnel to and from worksite in relation to the major hazards;
• replace hazardous materials and chemicals with less hazardous ones;
• minimise the use of protective safety systems that require high maintenance;
• minimise the number of ignition sources such as fired heaters and hot surfac