Development of Incident Investigation Model for Process Safety Management Compliance

Catastrophic industrial incidents continue to take place even after the proclamation of
Process Safety Management (PSM) with its purpose is to deter incident like the Bhopal
disaster in 1984 from reoccurring. Incident investigation element of PSM standard, 29
CFR 1910.119(m) outlines the requirements for identification of catastrophic incident,
incident investigation team setup, report writings, follow-up actions on the established
recommendations, communication of incident investigation findings with relevant
personnel, and report recordkeeping. However, the implementation of the standard is
subject to individual’s interpretation because it is a performance-based standard, which
is likely to lead to PSM standard noncompliance issues.