Deer Park Community Advisory Council (DPCAC) focused on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program called Process Safety Management (PSM) at its late February  meeting, 28 years to the day that the program became effective. PSM is a uniform set of rules for specific industries to safely manage the use, storage, manufacturing, handling, or moving of highly hazardous chemicals.  It was developed to protect workers from hazards associated with the use of highly-hazardous chemicals in such processes. 

Trilby Cressman of Evonik talked to DPCAC about each of the 14 elements of PSM and provided a list of the highly hazardous chemicals that, at certain quantities, would make a plant subject to PSM rules. 

The 14 PSM elements include Employee Participation, Process Safety Information, Process Hazard Analysis, Operating Procedures, Hot Work Permits, Management of Change, Pre-Startup Safety Reviews, Mechanical Integrity, Emergency Planning, Incident Investigation, Contractor  Training, Compliance Audits, and Trade Secrets. Cressman said that experience over nearly three decades has shown that PSM elements, when implemented successfully, have greatly reduced the number of catastrophic industry events.