Abstract

This PAGE of my website embodies my reflections of a life-time experience in formulating paradigms that can be used to deliver safer engineering designs, enhance professional career through understanding of subtle messages from colleagues, create awareness, and enhance sustainability of this planet. Skills are generally used to make a living. Without an understanding of how the technical society works, the most brilliant achievers of a skill may not be able to earn a living that they deserve. The appendix, Das’s laws, is an attempt to understand one’s own deficiencies and adaptability to the technical society.

Introduction of Das’s Laws in a nutshell: repeated here for the benefit of the readers.

1. Our senses conceal more things than they reveal; we are conditioned to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear.
2.  Some secular codes may seek immunity from reasoned queries.
3. Expressed Truth includes the Image (of speaker or writer) as well as the expression of the speaker or writer. Absolute Truth cannot be expressed. All expressed truths have a frame of reference and a domain of validity.
4.  Acceptance of Truth through information flow happens spontaneously in the direction of the image gradient, i.e., from a higher human image to a lower human image, as heat flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature.
5. When maximum allowable safe gap between principles and practices is exceeded and the deviation becomes actually normalized, incidents may happen: it is just a matter of time. [Bad behavior, when rewarded or tolerated, leads to worse behavior, which leads to accidents.]
6. Power of positive thinking saves your soul; Power of negative thinking saves your body.
7. Ecological impact and collateral damage of some targeted actions are unavoidable by-products of civilization. However, minimizing and mitigating the impact is our responsibility in order to sustain the planet.

In the following pages, I am going to explain to you why it is important to know how you fit in the working environment, your knowledge about the surrounding society, and why working hard alone does not bring equivalent return.

Das’s First Law [Limitations of Instruments and Sense Organs]

Our senses conceal more things than they reveal; we are conditioned to see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear.
Normally “we do not see objects as they are, but as we are” . No one in Process Safety has “Emmetropia”, a perfect vision of risks. Many instruments are used by the scientists and engineers to receive information: ultimately such information is received by five sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin, and interpreted by the sixth sense: mind. The process behind human perception is amazingly complex. Of the five senses outlined above; the sense of touch has subcategories: one dedicated to pressure, another for heat and cold, another for vibration and texture, and so on. Because of anomalous blending of senses known as synesthesia such as smelling a color, feeling a sound, tasting a shape, the responses from observers could differ. In the late 1940s, a scientist did some experiments on rats to examine their ability to find the source of food in a maze after gradually removing portions of the brain cells. To his surprise, he noticed that the rats could find the food source even after 90% of the brain cells were removed, and wrongly concluded that only 10% of the brain cells were required for the memory to function.

The fact was that different forms of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. The rats could use a combination of senses like vision, touch, smell, and hearing in their memory to reach the source. This exemplifies the need of redundancy to assure the availability on demand as called for in Safety Instrumented System (SIS). What you see is actually what you get. Vision processing takes more space of human brain than any other of the five senses. Vision processing requires high “Eye-Q”. Vision starts with light passing through the cornea, and then lens which helps to focus the object on the two-dimensional sheet of photoreceptor is called the retina. This information is then mapped on the cerebrum. The lens of the eye actually flips the object upside down and left to right and projects the object on the retina which interprets the three- dimensional world. The retina sends each half to the opposite side of the brain. One needs two eyes to have complete perspective of the object.

The perception of the left half of the object ends up in the right cerebrum and the right half, in the left cerebrum. As a result, our perception could be illusory. The famous Ames Room illusion has two people with about the same height standing at the two back corners: one farther away from the front. The third person views from the front through a small window. To any viewer, one would look taller than the other because of the restricted viewer’s angle and trapezoidal floor plan of the room.

The owner of cognitive bias is not aware of the ownership just as a pathological liar is not aware of his/her lies. Because of the cognitive bias, scientists can fail to see an abnormal experimental result as an opportunity for discovery, and engineers can fail to see a potential accident in progress.

“Abundant evidence suggests that people pay selective attention to arguments that simply reinforce their own viewpoints. They find disagreement unpleasant and are inclined to dislike bearer of positions that run counter to their current beliefs. Please see Scientific American, July 2018, p 39 . Super low frequency brain waves are linked to conscious states. Please see also Scientific American, July 2018, p 18. The concept of electron as taught in schools as a particle is wrong. An electron is not a particle, it is a vibrating string. In the absence of a supermicroscope, it appears to be a point particle: we see what we want to see.
Our ability to critically observe is restricted by concept of the three-dimensional space of the surrounding. Similarly, our Consciousness is limited by awareness. However, hyperdimensionality (dimensions higher than three) and Consciousness which go beyond three dimensions allow us to see the reality in broader aspects.

People who think deliberately slow may be linked to their conscious states. It is best to exemplify Das’s First Law. The interpretation of phenomenon visually observed requires high “Eye- Q”.

In the area of “listening”, an acronym EAR (Empathy, Adaptability, and Reading in-between lines) proposed by Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, published by Bantam Books, NY, July 1997, should be understood. Without a clear understanding of the acronym EAR, a traditional smart person (measured by IQ test) may act as dumb.

One story is described below.

Example 1: The Story of Explosion in the manufacturing facility of a suburban city in USA.
A two-story manufacturing facility in a suburban city in the Northeastern USA housed a batch chemical plant. The control room was upstairs. Downstairs, on both sides of the stairway, were two identical trains of chemical reactors. Each reactor went through five stages, the first four stages being automated: charging, reaction, transfer, cleaning, and dumping to drain (a manual step). Because the first four stages were automated, one could not initiate the dumping step unless the previous step was complete. An operator was asked to drain a specific reactor. He came down, made a wrong turn, and went to the wrong reactor. Obviously, he could not open the dump-valve because the valve was interlocked closed, since the reactor was in reaction phase. The operator concluded through his mind-set that he was right in his choice of the reactor, but the valve was stuck. He forced the valve open by removing the automated air supply and adding his own air cylinder. Explosion followed and killed the operator and several others who rushed to help. Ultimately, the incident led to the bankruptcy of the company. Sensitivity of Measuring Instruments.

The sensitivity window of sensing instruments, biological, mechanical, calorimetric, electromechanical, or otherwise affects the accuracy of measurements. For example, the decomposition temperature of a chemical varies widely depending on the type of calorimeter used to detect it. The quality of contact temperature sensors such as thermocouple, thermistor, bimetallic thermometer, resistance thermometer varies widely depending on design, quality of manufacturing etc. This is just one aspect of a good calorimeter. Other aspects include temperature and pressure tracking to maintain adiabaticity, heat-wait-search capability etc.

Importance of Listening

In the area of hearing, paying attention to the speaker is very important to get the message. The same letters constitute the words Listen and Silent. This means that the listener should maintain silence while listening. There are four types of listening:

• Pretended listening: The listener fakes listening due to multi-tasking and political correctness and misses the message.
•  Selective listening: The listener pays attention to words or subjects he/she likes.
• Attentive listening: The listener listens to all words of the speaker with or without reservation.
• Empathetic listener: The listener becomes one with the speaker (i.e., wears the speaker’s shoes) and observes the speaker’s point of view with an empathetic mind. There are three complementary aspects of speaking in getting a message across the audience: words with 10% weight, sound with 30% weight, and body language with 60% weight. The TV news opinion exchange is dominated by the first two and misses the purpose due to ping-pong effect (too many back-and-forth exchanges among speakers and anchors avoiding dialectic discussions leading to a consensus).

Das’s Second Law [Codes’ Immunity Power]

Some secular codes such as ASME Section VIII seek immunity from reasoned queries. The secular codes are created in every country for the uniform governance of the country and for the safety of its citizens. The constitution of the USA and the publications of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers are examples of secular codes. Codes are legal bindings and may not be disobeyed on technical grounds. Secular codes such as the publications of American Society of Mechanical Engineers may be used as flawless in litigation cases. The use of the word, “shall” is very common among the codes. Studies have proven that some statements in these codes are simply wrong. In every technical society, there are “right actions” which are not legal and there are “legal rules” which may not be right under current circumstances. All technical societies are codified for the governances of industries. All too often technical texts (such as “the 3% rule” of inlet pressure drop of relief valves in ASME VIII), are literally followed without paying attention to the accuracy of the rule. Such literal conformance may lead to incidents leading to the loss of properties and human lives. The position of a Lead Safety Engineer in the engineering center of a manufacturing company or a consulting engineering company is an advisory position based on truth transcending Institutional mandates, when appropriate, rather than seeking a refuse in them.

Das’s Third Law [Image Law]

Expressed Truth includes the Image (of speaker or writer) as well as the expression of the speaker or writer. Absolute Truth cannot be expressed. All expressed truths have a frame of reference and a domain of validity.

To put it simply, it is not what is being said, but who is saying it, is what matters. If a technical person does not project the expected image by a given society, the image can be improved by attaining the highest degree in the field of expertise or improving the communication skill.

Das’s Fourth Law [Law of Image Gradient]

Acceptance of Truth through information flow happens spontaneously in the direction of image gradient, i.e., from a higher human image to a lower human image, as heat flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature. Role of Human Image Human image addressed under Das’s Fourth Law refers to physical, intellectual, and ideological image. Some may be more dominant than others. This image reflects the social surrounding in which he/she grew up, ego, individuality, and personality. A man with an enormous power of wealth coupled with mainstream ideological image can get away with behavior which would call for incarceration of an ordinary citizen in many parts of the world.Perhaps the most glaring example of how image plays a role is exemplified in deciding to offer the Nobel Prize. In 1994, Yasser Arafat of Palestine was given the Nobel prize for Peace for bargaining a short-term peace between Palestine and Israel; however, Mahatma Gandhi of India was nominated six times for the Nobel prize for peace for ending the 200 year-British rule in India, yet every time the Nobel committee came up with a blatantly lame excuse to refuse the Nobel prize to Mahatma Gandhi.

Apparent-Cause and Root-Cause Truths.
In process safety, often an apparent cause, or a causal factor, or a symptom is accepted as the true cause without Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Removal of a causal factor would remove some symptom and benefit the production but would not prevent its recurrence. As a result, incidents repeat, and such repetitions are normalized. Such normalization sometimes results in loss of life and property. RCA is a team exercise and should involve all disciplines involved in the process. The removal of a causal factor is required in the management mode of an industrial process to keep the production going. One should not stop after removing the causal factor and looking for the root cause under the leadership mode.
Symptoms that prevent a professional from looking for root cause of a problem.

Three major symptoms prevent a person from looking for root causes in
safety are:

1. Titanic Syndrome: It manifests in overconfidence: “I-know-what-I-am- doing attitude”
2. Ostrich Syndrome: As a legend, the ostriches bury their head into the sand for food, making themselves vulnerable to predators looking for easy preys. In process safety, it is used as a metaphor for focusing on one contingency while totally ignoring others. An excellent figure is shown in Scientific American magazine, June 2020, page 78. Please refer to the Figure in the cited reference for Ostrich Syndrome.
3. Max-Elite syndrome: It has three sub-parts:
   a. “Profit-first-safety-second” attitude and forcing safety professional to wear business hat in maintaining schedule (Boeing 737 Max 8 crash in 2018 and 2019;  Challenger 11 gasket failure due to low temperature leading to mid-air explosion in 1986)
   b. Failure to understand the concept of “customer”. Customers, not the companies are the real providers of the salaries.
   c. Looking down upon the intelligence of people from different cultures. These syndromes are not necessarily corporate phenomena, but they represent the individual attitude of an executive in short-term profit. There are, by and large, great corporations in the USA, which have proven that Capitalism flourishes in a society in the long run.

 

Das’s Fifth Law [Gap between Principles and Practice]

When the maximum allowable safe gap between principles and practice is exceeded and such deviation is normalized, incidents may happen: it is just a matter of time. [Bad behavior, when rewarded or tolerated, leads to worse behavior.]
Example 1: Weak safety culture lacking detailed housekeeping rules One sugar refinery plant in a south-eastern city of USA had a long 80- year history of successful operation without any catastrophic incident. The company had a minimum standard of housekeeping with regard to sugar dust accumulates on the floor and equipment. The safety culture was, however, weak. The “Specific Safety Rules” book did not include dust explosion hazard. A facilities risk assessment was done by an independent organization, and management was reported about the lack of adequate protection from combustible dust hazard. The Housekeeping policies included planned daily, weekly, and monthly packaging area cleaning schedules. But they were not followed strictly, and such deviation was normalized. One year after the date of the assessment and the formulation of new policy, which was not implemented, the explosion took place and killed 14 people and injured 38.

Example 2: Routine violations safety interlocks In a specialty chemical plant of an agro-chemical company, the reactor residue with less than 1% of a reactive ingredient used to be transferred to a residue treater containing a solvent preheated to a temperature which would decompose the reactive ingredient as fast as it was added to the treater. The reactor was provided with an interlock system to prevent adding the reactive reactor residue to the residue treater vessel before filling the vessel with clean solvent and heating the solvent to minimum safe temperature below which the reactive residue would accumulate without decomposition. However, the control room operators routinely bypassed the interlock system with the permission of the manager to speed up production without any incident because of the presence of solvent at right temperature in the residue treater. On the eve of the ill-fated incident, the unit was started up after a shutdown and the operators inadvertently forgot to refill the residue treater with the solvent because of a weakly formulated start-up procedure. The normalized deviation of safe gap between the principles and the practices of the plant management was accepted, the reactor interlock system was bypassed, and reactive reactor residue was sent to residue treater with no solvent present in it. When a chemical reaction of the accumulated highly reactive residue started, it could not be stopped thereby leading to the explosion of the residue treater, fatalities, and destruction of the near-by equipment and consequential damage of homes in the neighborhood. The relief device of the residue treater was not sized for the runaway reaction that took place.

Das’s Sixth Law: Power of Negative Thinking

Power of positive thinking saves your soul; power of negative thinking saves your body.

Emergency Relief System (ERS) design, or any survival strategy, is rooted in the power of negative thinking. Best intentions (positive thinking) may lead to the worst scenarios.

In daily routines, when a person leaves home for work, positive thinking is uppermost in the person’s mind: everything will be fine. Scott Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz write in Scientific American Mind (p. 38):

“Optimism may sometimes keep us from seeing the reality with the necessary clarity… a rosy outlook is unlikely to benefit everyone… positive thinking may be counterproductive if it leads us to blithely ignore life & dangers.”

Therefore, when ERS designers move a computer mouse to start the design, they must think negatively and sometimes counterintuitively. A good place to start is the American Petroleum Institute Standard 521, Pressure-relieving and Depressuring Systems. Use the list of contingencies recommended in the standard and examine if the adopted lines of defense are adequate. If not, corrective measures are taken. A contingency is an experience-based scenario which is likely to happen, and the analysis of the contingency explains how equipment is protected if it happens. This contingency analysis must be done prior to purchasing equipment, during pre-startup checks, and upon changes in process or batch. The ERS designer must read any new guideline or recommended method with a will to doubt.

This ERS Design book shows how to develop the will to doubt.

Das’s Seventh Law: Price of Civilization

Ecological impact and collateral damage of some targeted actions are unavoidable but minimizable by-products of civilization.

Civilization involves movement of natural objects in a subjective orderly manner within a finite boundary, and in so doing, civilized society creates disorder within and more so outside the boundary. The net disorder continues to increase irreversibly. When the collective entropy reaches maximum in the universe, the universe comes to a grinding halt.

Pollution is a manifestation of such disorder and involves misplacement of energy and/or substances at an intensity or concentration that is harmful to any life form. Proactive measures are the key means to minimize pollution. Ironically, many “civilized” and “developed” nations are major contributors to global pollution, in addition to developing nations.

Harmony in life in a society manifests in empathic reduction in discrimination, inequality, and connection with the environment. When accumulated sins. Here sins are defined as wrongdoing of any kind, either moral including racial discrimination, or violation of industrial standards. It could be subjective. When this accumulated sins in a country anywhere in the world, however powerful it may be, exceed a certain limit, the country either turns into an effete civilization or reincarnates into a vigorous one.

During the week of March 23, 2020, when US airlines reduced domestic flights and petrochemical industries all over the world reduced production in the wake of the spread of COVID-19 disease, the air quality over some major cities in the US (Los Angeles) and India (New Delhi) showed appreciable improvement due to the slowdown in industrial productions, work allowed from home, and reduced traffic.

Historically, the human species continues pollution unabated until existence is threatened, and then people react under duress.

Civilized (advanced in social customs, art, and science) nations do not progress at the same rate on all fronts. In 2018, on November 26th, the USA (NASA’s Insight program) landed a vehicle on Mars for the 8th time. This time it was for the study of the structural integrity of the Martian soil. This news about the American achievement in the scientific front would lift the state of a scientific mind to an exhilarating scintillation. So, the Americans fall in one aspect and rise in another.

For example, uranium mining and transportation of hydrocarbons through piping sacrifices the life and health of local people in some developed countries through the law of eminent domain. Accidental dropping of H-bombs because of aircraft crashes in Greenland, where they are presumably preserved under deep and thick ice; the underground and underwater testing of nuclear weapons; the ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) landings in seas; and the debris (piling space junk) of spacecraft and propulsive rocket engines left in space by developed and developing countries (US, UK, Russia, China, India) are all detrimental to the environment and are byproducts of civilization.

Corporate greed (desire to have more than one’s fare share ignoring ethical standards) leading to total disregard for the environment may pay temporary benefits to the managers, but it will eventually result in the demise of such corporations unless a knowledgeable Pressure Safety Specialist involved in the project timely intervenes to change the mind of a conscientious management. Examples include silent ground pollution and water pollution committed by corporations in many developed and developing countries through mining, petrochemical, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. While public sentiments in developed countries remain unforgiving, corrupt governments in developing countries succeed in sustained pollution.

During World War II and after, nearly 300,000 tons of chemical weapons were dumped by the civilized superpowers in the Baltic Sea, including Skagerrak Strait, Norwegian trench, and Lille Belt. Some ships containing toxic materials were sunk.

In developing and developed countries, sites for manufacturing processes happen to be near poor neighborhoods. The scenario starts with the optimum project cost involving attractive real estate cost of the site. Later, developers find an opportunity for building affordable homes in the area. Poor people move in for affordable homes and jobs. The population densities in some major cities are too high; the slum area in Mumbai, India, has a population density of 800,000 people per square mile compared with New York City with 28,000 people per square mile.

The main incentives of some (not all) international companies towards locating manufacturing plants in underdeveloped countries are cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap utilities, cheap human life ($6.5 million per life in some Western countries versus $500 per life in some underdeveloped countries), and practically no environmental regulation in underdeveloped countries. Moving manufacturing processes from a developed country to an underdeveloped one where the cost of environmental protection, so-called unproductive safety systems, raw materials, utilities, and human life are low does not serve global sustainability but may serve local growth of a civilized society in the developed country. In some cases, it may backfire in the developed country where unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism among local under-educated people increase.

The death of US veterans from exposure to toxic waste created by open pit burning by the US military during Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts is an example of self-inflicted wounds—a byproduct of civilization.

Transferring manufacturing facilities to third-world countries with no enforceable environmental regulations is tantamount to defecating in someone else’s nest.

Satellite analysis released on June 2, 2019, by the Global Forest Watch network showed that a soccer-field-size area of tropical rain forest was lost every six seconds around the world in 2019. Cattle ranchers also contribute to the destruction of forests for cattle-feed. Nearly a third of the 12-million-hectare loss occurred within humid tropical primary forests, important areas for biodiversity and carbon storage. While noted politicians label global warming as a hoax, scientists in Iceland held a funeral for the loss of Iceland’s first glacier on August 18, 2019.

All industrially developed nations are involved in drilling crude oil, as one may have seen oil fields in rural areas from the display of slowly moving oil pump jacks. They, including the abandoned ones, and the fracking technology contribute to atmospheric methane, a global warming contributor. The methane concentration in air has increased from 1656.0 ppb in 1984 to 1892.4 ppb in 2020.

Does Nature Revolt from Time to Time?

We are an integral part of Nature. We work to adapt to the dynamic state of Nature; but because of our ego, we think that we are the doers. It seems that Mother Nature strikes back on our continual deforestation in acquiring land for industrialization, resulting in cruelty to forests, animals, and birds. The occurrence of pandemic diseases on Earth from time to time may reflect Nature’s revolt through weakening and overpowering the human immune system when human greed reaches a limit (subjective, defined by Nature). The appearances of pandemics, forest fires, tsunamis are byproducts of thoughtless progress that lead to a collision course with human destiny.

Any ERS design is incomplete until its environmental impact is studied thoroughly. Such studies include the design and cost of effluent handling equipment, dispersion analysis of gaseous pollutants, spread of liquid pollutants, thermal pollution, and their impact on surrounding life forms, along with associated remedial equipment costs.

An ERS Design is not just a design issue: it is an optimization issue involving the cost of the protected equipment and the cost of the effluent-handling equipment affecting the environment that minimizes risk and maximizes the economic potential of a corporation.

If you are playing a role as a Pressure Safety Specialist, it is your ethical duty to voice your concern about the long-term effects, including the company’s survival, to the management who may or may not follow your advice.