Reducing Vehicle Submersions and Consequent Fatalities on Highway I-75 in Florida (Alligator Alley): Effectiveness of a Cable Safety Barrier System

Objective: We evaluated the effectiveness of a Cable Safety Barrier (CSB) system in preventing Run-Off-Road (ROR) Vehicle Immersions (VIs) and fatalities in canals along the I-75 freeway (Alligator Alley) in Collier County, Florida. The CSB system, which runs along both sides of the 80-km stretch of freeway and was installed between 2003 and 2004. Methods: Data from the Fatal Analysis Reporting System (FARS) were used to compare annual VIs and VI fatalities between pre-installation of the CSB system (1995-2002) to post-installation (2005-2012). As well, post-installation data from the Florida Department of Transport (FDOT) (2007-2011) and police reports were reviewed to determine the number of, and manner in which, vehicles were either contained by, or crossed, the CSB by either penetrating or overriding the barriers. Results: Pre- to post-installation, total accidents increased from 81.4/y to 106.2/y, accidents resulting in VIs decreased from 13.8% to 2.4%, and accidents resulting in VI fatalities decreased from 3.4% to 0.4% (FDOT). Fatal vehicle immersions decreased from 2.4/y to 0.9/y (P<0.01) and vehicle immersion fatalities decreased from 3.3/y to 1.4/y (P<0.05) (FARS). Post-installation, 531 accidents occurred with 110 ROR vehicles travelling towards the canals; 91 vehicles contacted the CSB with only 14 vehicles (15.4%) penetrating the barrier, and 7 (7.7%) overriding the barrier (FDOT). Conclusion: The CSB system along I-75 in Collier County dramatically decreased ROR vehicles from reaching the parallel canals, and consequent vehicle immersion fatalities. Results support the installation of lateral CSB systems on other high-risk roadways to reduce ROR crashes into water, or with other secondary hazards.

Research on Action Layers and Application and Database Design of Safety Barrier in Petrochemical Plant

In recent years, petrochemical industry accidents occur frequently. The reason was that the existing safety measures were not comprehensive enough to protect all layers of production. It is an urgent problem for enterprises to improve the existing safety measures and form a system to cover all stages of production. Safety barrier can protect and control every layer of production, so as to protect the production process comprehensively, avoid, prevent and control accidents. Four action layers of safety barrier in petrochemical production were established, and the specific implementation method of safety barrier was proposed. This method was applied with taking atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit as an example. The results show that the atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit can be fully protected by the safety barrier through physical or non-physical means, and its safety has been significantly improved. Finally, the safety barrier database of petrochemical plant was designed and developed in order to manage the safety barrier information and make it convenient for personnel to use. The database functions include storing, querying, adding, modifying and deleting the names, categories, functions and specific description of the safety barrier.

Safety Barrier Management: Risk-Based Approach for the Oil and Gas Sector

In the Oil and Gas sector, risk assessment and management have always been critical due to the possibility of significant accidents associated with the presence of large amounts of flammable hydrocarbons. Methods to provide accurate and reliable risk analysis for an oil platform usually focus on critical equipment and identify causes and consequences of loss of containment. Safety barriers are important elements of such accident scenarios, aiming to reduce the frequency of unwanted events. Estimating the performance of safety barriers is essential for the prevention of major accidents. This work first focuses on the application of risk-based analysis on the process area equipment of the floating platform Goliat. Such an approach is secondly extended to the most relevant safety systems to prevent fires and explosions and consequent catastrophic domino effects. An additional challenge resides in the fact that safety barriers cannot always be classified as equipment, as they are often composed of operational and organizational elements. Through the application of the ARAMIS Project (Accidental Risk Assessment Methodology for Industries in the Context of the Seveso II Directive) results, the frequency modification methodology based on TEC2O (TEChnical Operational and Organizational factors) and the REWI (Resilience-based Early Warning Indicators) method, it is possible to quantify the safety barrier performance, to reduce the frequency of unwanted events. While conducting this study, the importance of the management factor in combination with technical and technological aspects of safety barrier performance was analyzed. Starting from the initial project conditions, applying worsening technical factors, and simulating n organizational management for the safety systems, it is possible to quantify the performance of the safety barriers, highlighting the importance of management factors in terms of prevention of major accidents, and to assess the dynamic risk for the overall plant.

Towards Safety Barrier Analysis of Hydrogen Powered Maritime Vessels

This paper focuses on the use of safety barrier analysis, during the design phase of a vessel powered by cryogenic hydrogen, to identify possible weaknesses in the architecture. Barrier analysis can be used to evaluate a series of scenarios that have been identified in the industry as critical. The performance evaluation of such barriers in a specific scenario can lead to either the approval of the design, if a safety threshold is met, or the inclusion of additional barriers to mitigate risk even further. By conducting a structured analysis, it is possible to identify key barriers that need to be included in the system, intended both as physical barriers (sensors, cold box) and as administrative barriers (checklist, operator training). The method chosen for this study is the Barrier and Operational Risk Analysis (BORA) method. This method, developed for the analysis of hydrocarbon releases, is described in the paper and adapted for the analysis of cryogenic hydrogen releases. A case study is presented using the BORA method, developing the qualitative barrier analysis. The qualitative section of the method can be easily adapted to vessels of different class and size adopting the same storage solution. The barrier analysis provides a general framework to analyze the system and check that the safety requirements defined by the ship operator and maritime certification societies are met.

Vacuum exhausted isolation locker (VEIL) to reduce inpatient droplet/aerosol transmission during COVID-19 pandemic

The vacuum-exhausted isolation locker (VEIL) provides a safety barrier during the care of COVID-19 patients. The VEIL is a 175-L enclosure with exhaust ports to continuously extract air through viral particle filters connected to hospital suction. Our experiments show that the VEIL contains and exhausts exhaled aerosols and droplets.