Recording of Risk Assessments

Most HAZOP reports that I have seen (including my own) do not adequately record the risk assessments that have been carried out. If recording by exception is used, no record is made of any risk identified unless a recommendation was deemed necessary. With full recording, the hazard identification is obvious, and the identification of causes and consequences is recorded (but not always!). The evaluation of the risk is implied to be either insignificant or under control if no recommendation is made. Often existing controls are not mentioned.

To ensure that our records are adequate to meet the legislative requirements, we need to make up these deficiencies. The simplest way to do this is to add a couple of columns to the normal HAZOP log sheet, so that we can record 'Existing Controls' and 'Risk with Existing Controls', so that this information is unlikely to be forgotten. Figure 3 shows an example of a HAZOP Log Sheet with these extra columns.