How a bow tie can help fight COVID-19
With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the energy industry, as well as wider society, a group of bow tie specialists have developed a ‘personal’ bow tie for COVID-19, whether for people who are at their normal place of work, working at home, or when in wider society.
The COVID-19 bow tie was prepared reactively in response to other bow ties that did not properly apply the principles of the consolidated knowledge provided in CCPS/EI Bow ties in risk management: A concept book for process safety (1st edition, September 2018). Issues with these other bow ties included giving a false sense of security by listing too many ‘barriers’, many of which really were only lower level controls.
The Covid-19 bow tie was prepared using ‘sweat equity’ by bow tie specialists who were a sub-set of the project team that directed the authors of the joint CCPS/EI publication. Given the rapid changes to knowledge and efficacy of the barriers and controls, there have been two editions of the bow tie thus far. This agile way of working differs from conventional EI technical resources, which tend not to be revised before their five-yearly default periods.
Bow tie for Covid-19 provides the bow tie an and explanation of how it is constructed; whereas the EI blog provides a lay person’s introduction to the use of bow ties in risk management.
An overview of the Covid-19 bow tie was presented alongside three related topics to international delegates of a Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) webinar, held 7 April 2020.A further development is that a simplified version of the bow tie has been drafted for the front-line operator/supervisor users of Toolbox. Toolbox also contains an incident case study of a Covid-19 outbreak on vessel, which identifies what was learned and why did the incident happen.
Additional information on business disruption due to COVID-19 can be found in the CCPS monograph Risk-based process safety during disruptive times https://www.aiche.org/ccps/publications/process-safety-monographs.
