CAREERS

CHEMICAL ENGINEERS WHO CHANGED

THE WORLD

tce

A lifetime spent

saving lives
Trevor Kletz, the father of inherent safety,
explains his remarkable career

HEN it comes to the topic of

process safety, the one name that
comes to mind instantly is that of
Trevor Kletz.
One of the first people to be given a new
kind of position that of technical safety
advisor in the 1960s, it was Kletz who
developed the concept of inherent safety. First
set out in the article What you Dont Have
Cant Leak, published in Chemistry & Industry
in 1978, the concept postulates that the best
way to reduce risk is to avoid the hazard rather
than control it, ie by designing it in a way that
minimises the use of dangerous substances or
processes.
The idea was at odds with conventional
thinking at the time, which centred around
safety devices designed to control accidents,
but it was nevertheless well received. The
feedback I got at the time was very positive,
Kletz confirms. Indeed, leading regulators
worldwide have since embraced the concept,
and agencies including the Health and Safety
Executive, the European Commission and
the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission have
enshrined the principle though regulations
such as COMAH and the Seveso II Directive,
both of which recommend applying the
principle of inherent safety to avoid or reduce
hazards at source.

a chemistry set with

consequences
Kletz became interested in process safety
by experiencing first hand how a process
plant works and the hazards it can represent.
Born in 1922 as the oldest of three children,
his father, a shopkeeper, was insistent that
young Kletz should better himself and go to
university. When I was 11 years old, an uncle
had given me a chemistry set as a present.
When I arrived at university there was no
doubt Id study chemistry. Living in Chester,
Liverpool was closest so Kletz attended
Liverpool University.
After graduating in 1944, he got an offer
to join ICI in Billingham in its research
labs. I considered myself very lucky ICI
was considered a very good employer and

youd have to be foolish to turn

them down. Kletz was to stay at
Billingham for the whole 38 years
he spent with ICI.

no test tube in sight

When I joined I expected to
be spending my life pouring
liquids from one test tube into
another but I actually never
touched a test tube in the whole
time I was there! he says. ICIs
research department was far
more concerned with solving
engineering problems. Seven
years of solving chemical
engineering problems steadily
moved Kletz away from
chemistry and towards chemical
engineering. It isnt as if I ever
took a formal degree in chemical
engineering, I just became
one without even realising it,
hesays.

managing plants
and people
After seven years, Kletz was
promoted to plant manager very much
a hands-on job. Over the next 16 years, he
would be running plants and troubleshooting
problems, working his way through a
succession of iso-octane, acetone and tar
acids plants. This gave him the opportunity
to learn first-hand how the plants operated,
from the shop floor up. The iso-octane
plant to which I was first assigned had been
operating for 12 years, the shift foremen were
experienced. Everything that could go wrong
had gone wrong before so the foremen knew
exactly what to do and just got on with it,
despite the lack of any up-to-date operating
instructions (something I was to remedy),
Kletz wrote in his autobiography, By Accident.
Kletz not only got a detailed first-hand view
of how a chemical plant was operated, he
also learned how to influence people, how to
identify the gate-keepers for a given job, and
how to get them on side. The technique is

One of the first people to be

given a new kind of position
that of technical

safety advisor

in the 1960s, it was Kletz

who developed the concept of

inherent safety

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CHEMICAL ENGINEERS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

There was no realisation at

the time that safety required
a technical input or should
go much beyond removing
obvious mechanical hazards
and ordering protective
clothing.

good-natured persistence you have to keep

on lobbying and persuading until your job is
done, he wrote. It was a skill he would put to
good use in later life.
Kletz first formal safety assignment came
in 1955, when he was named part-time safety
officer at ICIs Oil Works. But there was no
realisation at the time that safety required a
technical input or should go much beyond
removing obvious mechanical hazards
and ordering protective clothing, and Kletz
concluded that safety was dull.

the birth of HAZOP

Kletz has sometimes been credited with
developing the concept of HAZOP, but
thats not true. HAZOP grew out of critical
examination, a technique popular with ICI
during the 1960s for examining management
decisions. Ken Gee, a production manager
with ICI, decided to apply this technique to
the design of a new phenol plant and, over a
four-month period, spent three days a week,
every week, examining every aspect of the
plant, discovering many potential hazards
and operating problems that would not have
been foreseen otherwise. It was, Kletz says,
the first recognisable hazard and operability
study (HAZOP).

At the time I was too busy running the

existing plants to take much interest in the
new one, he wrote. Later, when I took the
full-time safety job I became an enthusiastic
advocate of HAZOP.

the safety advisor

The position of technical safety advisor was
a step in a new direction for ICI, prompted
by unhappy necessity. We had several years
where ICI suffered accidents, and five people
were killed in three years on the North Tees
Works alone. Ken Gee, whod been promoted
to production director, convinced the board
that it needed someone with a technical
background to focus on safety. As Id shown
more interest in that side of my work than
many other people I was asked to prepare a
job description one which my boss at the
time said specified one Trevor Kletz.
Kletz remit was broad: to advise designers
and operating staff on how to avoid accidents,
specifically with regards to process accidents
(rather than slips, trips and falls and so
on). Kletz says: it was a challenge I met
through persuasion by showing them the
consequences of bad practices and design,
sharing the lessons of accidents and near
misses.

learning lessons
Kletz biggest challenge was to ensure such
lessons were not forgotten indeed this would
become a mantra for the rest of his career. He
wrote in his autobiography: It is not sufficient
to check that rules are being followed or
people will stop following them as soon as
attention decreases. We have to convince
people they should be followed.
Kletz used weekly briefings, where
he challenged representatives from key
departments to an open group discussion of
an incident, to get people to actively think
about safety issues.
Kletz points out that sadly, nearly every
accident that happens has happened before.
Following an accident, I used to say to people
whove had an accident dont write a report,
Ive got it on file already, he says.

safety newsletters
To better share information, Kletz started
compiling that kind of information in a
series of safety newsletters, which were
read by plant managers, designers, and
maintenance people throughout ICI and at
many companies beyond. It was a runaway
success: while the first issue in 1968 was sent
to only around 30 people, by the time Kletz
left ICI in 1982 it was circulated to several
thousand people in all of ICIs divisions and
many external companies, university and
safety regulators.
Kletz was also a strong supporter of
IChemEs Loss Prevention Bulletin, a
54

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dont ask, just do

inherent safety
The plethora of accidents and near misses
that Kletz examined in his role as safety
advisor germinated what would become his
fundamental insight: the idea of inherent
safety, summed up neatly in his 1978 article
What you Dont Have, Cant Leak.
The article was prompted by the
Flixborough explosion four years earlier,
the UKs worst ever chemicals accident.
Kletz, who contributed to a government
enquiry considering the wider implications
of Flixborough, noted that the explosion at
Flixborough was so devastating because the
process was very inefficient, and the plant
ran with a large inventory of hazardous
chemicals. The best way to make the plant
safer would be to increase the conversion
rate and reduce the inventory, Kletz argued.
In developing the idea further in his book
Process Plants: A Handbook for Inherently
Safer Design, Kletz identified four principles:
Intensification: Use small amounts of
hazardous materials (a smaller inventory) so
the consequences of accidents arising from
the escape of materials are much reduced.
Substitution: Use a less hazardous material
less flammable or less toxic.

All risks

Process risks
2

2
/8
78
19

0
/8
76
19

8
/7
74
19

6
/7
72
19

4
/7
70
19

2
/7
68
19

0
19

66

/7

8
/6
64
19

6
/6
62
19

60

/6

0
19

Like most things he did, Kletz grasped the

initiative without seeking permission or
approval from superiors not for starting the
newsletter, nor for setting numerical safety
targets, or indeed whether a particular type
of equipment should be installed at a given
facility.
This was typical for ICIs ethos you
didnt ask what you should do, you just did
what you thought was right, he says. In
his autobiography, he adds: If one asked
permission there was a 50% chance it would
be refused. If one just got on with it, 19 times
out of 20 nothing was said. Even if there was
the odd manager that had reservations, Kletz
maintains it was far better to explain what he
had done, than what he was going to do.

FAR: Number of fatalities per 108 working hours

bi-monthly magazine sharing lessons from

incidents.

tce
Graph courtesy of PFV Publications

CAREERS
CHEMICAL ENGINEERS WHO CHANGED
THE WORLD

ICIs fatal accident rates (FAR the number of fatal accidents in 108 working hours or in a group
of 1,000 men in a working lifetime) expressed as a 5-year moving average

Attenuation: If a hazardous material must

be used, use it a) under less hazardous
conditions or b) in the least hazardous form.
Limitation of effects: Limit the effects of
failures by changing the design or conditions
of use rather than by adding protective
equipment that may fail or be neglected.

obvious in hindsight
Inherent safety is an excellent example
of Kletz ability to present complex ideas
in a simple and understandable way,
says Robin Turney, safety consultant and
former longstanding chair of IChemEs
Loss Prevention Panel. The importance of
material hazards, inventory and operating
conditions etc were understood beforehand
but there was no concept bringing these
together. Inherent safety seems obvious
now but very few of us were able to see this
beforehand.
Kletz notes that most plant designers
were confident in their ability to control
hazards and had not given much thought
to minimising inventories. That confidence

The importance of material

hazards, inventory and
operating conditions etc
were understood beforehand
but there was no concept
bringing these together.
Inherent safety seems
obvious now but very few
of us were able to see this
beforehand.

Happy birthday Trevor Kletz!

Inherent process safety: building on Kletz legacy PSEP special issue
See www.icheme.org/journals, or for order information email
[email protected], quoting Trevor Kletz anniversary

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CHEMICAL ENGINEERS WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Trevors greatest
contribution has been
to give process safety a
respectability and interest
which enabled engineers
across the world to adopt it
and apply it to the plants for
which they were responsible.

evaporated in the aftermath of Flixborough

and particularly Bhopal the notorious
explosion of a Union Carbide pesticides plant
in 1984, which killed 2,000 people.
While the concept was well received within
the process engineering community, it still
took some time before it became widely
applied. Indeed some organisations were
too self-absorbed and overconfident to take
note of new ideas notably Union Carbide.
Bhopal would not have been anywhere
near as deadly had the plant been designed
to Kletz ideal. Afterwards Union Carbide
(and other companies) greatly reduced their
storage capacity for MIC and other toxic
intermediates, Kletz wrote. But despite the
fact that the ideas had been discussed for
almost ten years already, Kletz says he doubts
if those concerned at Union Carbide had ever
heard of the phrase what you dont have
cant leak, or the concept of inherently safer
plants, which springs from it. It is devastating
that it took such a huge loss of life to shatter
the complacent reliance on safety systems.

lasting legacy
The numbers speak for themselves: during
Kletz 14 years as safety advisor to ICI, the
companys fatal accident rate fell from seven
fatalities per 108 working hours (four of
which were from process risks) in 1968 to 2.5
fatalities per 108 working hours (with almost
none from process risks) at the time of his
retirement in 1982.
In broader industry, the impact of his work
is impossible to chart, and nobody can count
how many lives he has saved. Clearly, neither
Flixborough nor Bhopal would have been
anything near as deadly as they were had the
plants in question been designed according
to Kletz tenets and with his thinking
enshrined in todays safety legislation, there
is no question that Kletz is one chemical
engineer who changed the world.

a lasting legacy
Summing up Kletz legacy is not easy, because
he has contributed in many different ways.
Turney says: Before Flixborough, there was
an emphasis on conventional safety and
following the rules. These rules, which were

based on past experience, were effective for

many of the conventional hazards, they were
not good enough for a chemical industry
which was facing rapid change, with new
processes and dramatic increases in scale.
Trevors main contribution was to recognise
that a different, risk-based approach was
necessary to control these hazards.
He adds: In my mind, Trevors greatest
contribution has been to give process safety
a respectability and interest which enabled
engineers across the world to adopt it and
apply it to the plants for which they were
responsible.
Judith Hackitt, chair of the Health and
Safety Executive and deputy president of
IChemE, says: Many of the tough messages
which I now deliver to the UKs major hazard
industries as chair of HSE are designed to
reinforce the principles and lessons that I
have learned from Trevor. His messages about
the importance of inherent safety in design
and the need to learn and share lessons from
incidents are as true today as they have ever
been and the need to pass the message on
to future generations of engineers will never
stop.
For himself, speaking just ahead of his 90th
birthday, Kletz simply says: Ive saved a lot
of peoples lives. Thats something I can be
proud of.

further reading
The most recent issue of our journal Process
Safety and Environmental Protection is a
special issue in honour of Kletz 90th birthday,
and a special issue of the Loss Prevention
Bulletin charting his contribution to process
safety is due out in early October.
Meanwhile, an archive of Kletz ICI Safety
Newsletters is available for free via IChemEs
website: visit www.icheme.org/shop and
search for newsletter.

tce

[email protected]
Next month: Magnus von Braun the
rocket scientist who brought Hitlers
rockets to the US.

Happy birthday Trevor Kletz!

Trevors contribution and enduring relevance LPB special issue
Special price 20 pre-order now!
Tel: +44 (0)1788 578214
Email: [email protected]

56

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