There is safe design and there is safer design. With safe design, there are active safeguards to prevent the occurrence of hazardous events and to protect people and plant from the effects. With safer design, there are fewer hazards, fewer causes and fewer people to be exposed to the effects. Currently, the majority of our designs strive to produce safe designs but in doing so, the facilities are becoming more complex, with increased maintenance and human exposure. This paper argues that industry has been trying too hard, and in doing so, has lost many of the opportunities to minimize risk at source. This paper offers an alternative route to design safety, an inherently safer one, through simplification, reliability and longevity. It uses examples from offshore facilities to illustrate these arguments.
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