Mythbusting Safety Engineering – FAQ
Safety engineering is an essential discipline in the design of safe technologies, processes, and facilities. Often operating behind the scenes, safety engineers work closely with design engineers to identify and assess hazards, and to develop solutions that improve the inherent safety of a system. Where hazards cannot be eliminated through design, safety engineers specify engineered mitigation measures such as blast walls or process separation to reduce the risk to people, plant, and the environment.
1. What is the purpose of safety engineering?
The core purpose of safety engineering is to embed, wherever practicable, engineering controls that minimise the likelihood of uncontrolled releases of hazardous materials or energy, and if such events occur, reduce their potential consequences. Safety engineers work with design teams to ensure that the technology, process, or plant is inherently safe, eliminating or minimising reliance on human intervention.
2. Is safety engineering the same as process safety management?
No. Safety engineering focuses on the design phase, ensuring that systems are inherently safe and that protection is built into the design so that safety is not dependent on operational vigilance alone.
Process Safety Management (PSM), on the other hand, is concerned with operating and maintaining the plant safely over its lifecycle. It ensures that once the design is implemented, it is operated as intended to prevent incidents.
In essence:
Safety engineering = designing it right
PSM = running it right
3. How does safety engineering relate to HSE / OHS?
Safety engineering ensures that technologies, systems, and facilities are designed to be safe to operate - so that under normal and foreseeable abnormal conditions, people are not harmed.
HSE/OHS professionals, by contrast, focus on protecting people during work execution - for example, managing risks related to hand injuries, working at height, or vehicle operation.
Both are essential and the best way to look at it - they are holding different ends of the same safety rope - one focuses on safe design, the other on safe execution.
4. Isn’t having a safety engineer just another project expense? Can’t the design engineers do it?
No. Safety engineering is a specialised field requiring a deep understanding of how all engineering disciplines integrate to ensure overall system safety. While discipline engineers aim to make their systems safe, what is "safe" in one domain may introduce risk in another.
The safety engineer’s role is to look at the whole system from a people and protection perspective, identifying potential conflicts and gaps between disciplines. A good safety engineer can reduce cost, rework, and risk - a poor one can do the opposite.
5. When should a safety engineer be engaged in a project?
As early as possible - ideally during project planning or concept design. An experienced safety engineer can identify the necessary safety activities and assessments, and align them with design milestones to avoid costly rework.
Even if two projects use the same design, differences in site location, hazards, or regulations can significantly alter the inherent safety of the plant and its risk profile - underscoring the value of early engagement.
6. How long does it take to become a safety engineer?
Like all engineering disciplines, becoming a proficient safety engineer takes time - progressing from graduate to principal level is a multi-year journey.
There are two key learning areas:
Understanding design engineering disciplines, and
Mastering safety engineering techniques and assessments.
A competent safety engineer does far more than conduct fire and explosion studies or quantitative risk assessments. These studies are used to validate the design, not create it. Safety engineering is rich in technical content, and a skilled practitioner can save significant time, cost, and risk. A poor one, unfortunately, can add all three.
7. Can software replace the safety engineer?
Absolutely not. While safety engineering software, such as for fire, explosion, and gas dispersion modelling is valuable, it covers only a small fraction of what safety engineers do.
Software is a tool, not a substitute. It runs calculations based on inputs provided. If the inputs are wrong, the outputs will be too. Software cannot make engineering judgments, interpret design intent, or foresee unintended interactions between systems.
In summary, software assists the safety engineer - it does not replace them.