Here's a link I should have known about long ago and didn't. It should probably be on the bookmark list of every process automation geek. The Abnormal Situation Management Consortium (ASM) is providing good information and research on the tricky business of keeping things together when they're starting to spin out of control.

Here's ASM's mission statement:

From the press release:

PAS Introduces Operator Alert – An Essential Supplement to an Alarm System
 
Operator Alert provides an easy-to-use web interface for creating & editing alerts for managing process operations
 
 
Houston, TX – May 6, 2008 – PAS, a leading global supplier of software products and engineering consulting services for the process industries, today announced the release of Operator Alert, a new addition to its already successful critical condition management products....

Well, let's see who's awake and interested this morning...

Here's an interesting question that surfaced on the SCADA listserv this weekend.

Is alarm management for DCS (as most recently codified in the new EEMUA guidelines) the same as alarm management for SCADA systems? Are the criteria for number and type of alarms per unit time the same?

Aslan Muhamad Sufian, from TNB Transmission in Malaysia, says, "I think this guideline is more suitable for DCS. The EEMUA 191 states that the alarm arriv...

From the press release:

In 2008, TiPS celebrates 20 years in the field of alarm management. It all started with a seemingly innocent consulting job to, "Do something about that @#!& printer!" The solution was a custom-written software program, widely recognized today as LogMate. Today LogMate is much more advanced than it was back then, but TiPS owes 20 years of success to the little program that could.

Robert Weibel, President of TiPS, Incorporated, has been a part of the com...

According to published news reports, there has been an explosion and fire at the Alon Refinery in Big Spring, TX. Apparently four persons were injured, at least one severely. No fatalities have been reported. The cause of the incident is not yet known.

As most of us in the process industries know, this strikes pretty close to home. Especially since the editorial staff of Control met and  talked with several Big Spring employees at last year's Honeywell User Group Americas meeting in Phoenix in ...

From Sicco Dwars at Shell Global Solutions: (and he is quite correct, too...which leads me to again ask what it will take to get the US government to act to prevent this kind of disaster...)

Walt,

Reading your blog on dust explosions, and a claim of being Control"GLOBAL", targeted at global audience, some recognition for the European ATEX directive, now EU law, would be justified here I think. Yes, Europeans have a tendency to over...

Joe Kaulfersch of Pepperl+Fuchs tried to post as a comment a white paper that he wrote on preventing just the sort of dust explosion that we all theorize might have caused the disaster at the Imperial Sugar Dixie Crystals plant near Savannah, Georgia last Thursday.

I asked him to send me the white paper instead, and rather than post it as a very wordy and difficult to read comment, I posted the white paper to the ControlGlobal.com white paper library. Here's the URL of this excellent discussion...

The news media are full of reports of the disaster that occurred overnight at the Dixie Crystals plant, now owned by Imperial Sugar, in Savannah, Ga.'Sound Off! Editors' Blog'

Well, we've had another Sarbanes-Oxley event. This time, a plant called T2 Labs in Jacksonville, Fla. suffered an explosion which killed at least three persons and sent at least fourteen to area hospitals.

See the report here: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/12/19/florida.explosion/index.html

It is simply too early to determine the cause of the explosion and fire. At the same time, it is useful to look at it as an e...

Last week, the UK HSE (Health and Safety Executive), the UK equivalent of OSHA, reported that in their opinion, more than half of the oil and gas industry's basic assets in the UK North Sea that have been inspected over the past 3 years are in poor condition, and companies will face closure or prosecution if they do not improve safety standards. D'you think we're ever going to learn? R...