Location of a Control Room Considerations
Location
The location for the control room was initially, and by necessity, close to the operating equipment, driving the evolution of control rooms. Many of these control rooms have been closed by either regulation, management initiatives to provide a safe work environment for process control operators, or centralization and consolidation of control rooms.
Location is also considered from many other aspects, as detailed below.
Safety
After a number of fatal accidents and loss of life because the occupied building did not provide adequate protection for the inhabitance.
New regulations, guidance, and recommended practices have been developed, encouraging companies to remove all non-essential personnel outside the blast range or dangerous areas, or Fire, Explosion, and Toxicity.
One of the most impressive statements I have heard in my 50 years in the processing industry is: -
“Safety is not a priority” When I first listened to this statement, I thought my heart had stopped; however, when the following statement was made, I made a physical transition in my thinking. The person went on to say, “Safety should be a value, priorities change, but values are something we always do, like getting dressed in the morning.”
I like this statement, and when I internalized it, I thought that is so true, and why sometimes people put safety on the back burner, and we have stupid accidents. I can relate. Every morning I get dressed to go to work, and I would never go to work naked (thank God), but washing my hair or shaving is a priority, and I have been known to go to work without doing one of these due to other priorities. If I got an emergency call-out, I got dressed and went to work. I didn’t stop for a shower or a shave. I reacted because of other priorities. However, I always wore clothes before getting into the car. Sometimes I may have been tempted to turn up in my pajamas just to give the night shift a message that I should be asleep in bed. I have work in the morning.
As we consider safety against location, we have many considerations to consider, and today we have guidance from regulators and trade associations regarding this topic. I like what the UK HSE has done in raising concerns and promoting best practices to address this issue.
In the USA, OSHA negotiates to move non-essential personnel out of danger. It has been more forceful after an accident. Shame we need to kill people before doing the right thing. The API provides an excellent Recommended Practice (API RP 752) to guide this topic. It discusses the type of building required to ensure the health and safety of personnel and to promote reducing risk by moving non-essential personnel outside the risk zone.
Accident summary
During the morning of Friday, 25 September 1998, a pump supplying heated lean oil to heat exchanger GP905 in Gas Plant No. 1 went offline for four hours due to an increase in flow from the Marlin Gas Field, which caused an overflow of condensate in the absorber.
A heat exchanger is a vessel that allows the transfer of heat from a hot stream to a cold stream, and so does not operate at a single temperature but experiences a range of temperatures throughout the vessel.
Temperatures throughout GP905 normally ranged from 60 °C to 230 °C (140 °F to 446 °F). Investigators estimated that, due to the failure of the lean oil pump, parts of GP905 experienced temperatures as low as −48 °C (−54 °F). Ice had formed on the unit, and it was decided to resume pumping heated lean oil in to thaw it. When the lean oil pump resumed operation, it pumped oil into the heat exchanger at 230 °C (446 °F)—the temperature differential caused a brittle fracture in the exchanger (GP905) at 12.26 pm.
About ten metric tonnes of hydrocarbon vapor were immediately vented from the rupture. A vapor cloud formed and drifted downwind. When it reached a set of heaters 170 meters away, it ignited. This caused a deflagration (a burning vapor cloud). The flame front burnt its way through the vapor cloud without causing an explosion. When the flame front reached the rupture in the heat exchanger, a fierce jet fire developed that lasted for two days.
The rupture of GP905 led to other releases and minor fires. The main fire was an intense jet fire emanating from GP905. There was no blast wave—the nearby control room was undamaged. Damage was localized to the immediate area around and above the GP905 exchanger.
Peter Wilson and John Lowery were killed in the accident, and eight others were injured.
The fire at the plant was not extinguished until two days later. The Longford plant was shut down immediately, and the state of Victoria was left without its primary gas supplier. Within days, the Victorian Energy Network Corporation shut down the state's entire gas supply. The resulting gas supply shortage devastated Victoria's economy, crippling industry and the commercial sector (in particular, the hospitality industry, which relied on natural gas for cooking). The loss to the industry during the crisis was estimated at around A$1.3 billion.
As natural gas was also widely used in houses in Victoria for cooking, water heating, and home heating, many Victorians endured 20 days without gas hot water or heating.
Gas supplies to Victoria resumed on 14 October. Many Victorians were outraged and upset to discover only minor compensation on their next gas bill, with the average compensation figure being only around $10.[1]
In this incident, part of the delay in shutting the three gas plants down was that the fire caused the loss of the central control room, and the procedure to manage the incident or provide a guiding direction was lost with the loss of the control room.
The API provided a Recommended Practice (RP) 752, which focuses attention on the exposure risk by people working in buildings within hazardous areas. The API RP 752 is advertised as follows:
This recommended practice (RP) provides guidance for managing the risk from explosions, fires, and toxic material releases to on-site personnel located in new and existing buildings intended for occupancy. This RP was developed for use at refineries, petrochemical, and chemical operations, natural gas liquids extraction plants, natural gas liquefaction plants, and other onshore facilities covered by OSHA 29 CFR 1910.119 [1].
Buildings covered by this RP are rigid structures intended for permanent use in fixed locations. Tents, fabric enclosures, and other soft-sided structures are outside the scope of this document.
Guiding Principles
This RP is based on the following guiding principles:
a) locate personnel away from process areas consistent with safe and effective operations;
b) minimize the use of buildings intended for occupancy in close proximity to process areas;
c) manage the occupancy of buildings in close proximity to process areas;
d) design, construct, install, modify, and maintain buildings intended for occupancy to protect occupants against explosion, fire, and toxic material releases;
e) manage the use of buildings intended for occupancy as an integral part of the design, construction, maintenance, and operation of a facility.
When we address safety, we have to consider not just explosions but:-
· Vapor Cloud Explosions (VCEs)
· Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions (BLEVEs)
· Pressure bursts
· Exothermic reactions
· Toxic gas releases
· Fires, including pool fires, jet fires, flash fires, and fireballs.
These often influence the building location and the staff allocated in the control room. We consider two inhabitants of the control suite, one being the Primary Users, which are the Control Room Operators, Supervisors, and Control Engineers. We then have Secondary Users. These are Managers, Engineers, and Maintenance people.
As part of the consideration to protect the building inhabitants against a Toxic Gas release, control rooms are protected by sensors that close louvers associated with HVAC air intakes, allowing the building to be sealed through pressurization, keeping the toxic gas outside.
A common Gas alarm is sounded in the control room, which will initiate a procedure to minimize door opening and closing, checking to ensure that the HVAC unit has shut down due to the automatic closure of the vents, and a stopwatch started to measure time since closure. In a prolonged emergency, Control Room Operators will make ready umbilical breathing air if fitted, and all unnecessary personnel will be evacuated using escape masks.
All unnecessary equipment should be shut down to minimize the potential of an ignition source for any flammable liquids or gases in the atmosphere.
The UK HSE, in their Control Room Design document, recommends that designers consider the:-
The threat from explosions and pressure bursts should be considered in the structural design of the control building. A methodology for this is presented in the recent CIA/CISHEC guidance CIA Guidance for the location and design of the occupied building on chemical manufacturing sites.
This considers the vulnerability of the building to possible overpressures associated with particular events. Buildings should be designed to withstand overpressure, ensuring that risks to individuals within the building are below acceptable limits.
Particular attention should be given to the provision of windows, the presence of heavy equipment on roofs (e.g., air conditioners), and the ability of internal fixtures to withstand the building shaking. If windows are present, consideration should be given to the use of laminated or polycarbonate glass to prevent serious injury to occupiers of the control room in the event of an overpressure.
ALARP principles should be applied in these considerations and cost-benefit used to determine if additional measures should be implemented.
In a review of toxic gas releases, the control room should provide a safe haven for its occupants. This will include arranging that the building is adequately sealed to prevent the ingress of gases to levels of concentration that will affect the health and, thereby, the ability of the operators to maintain control of the plant. Careful consideration of the building ventilation system is required to ensure that air intakes are situated away from areas that may be affected or to arrange that there is no air intake during an incident, preferably by closing an automatic valve linked to a gas analyzer.
Measures for protection from fires should ensure that the control room will withstand thermal radiation effects without collapse and that smoke ingress is controlled. Materials of construction should be fire-resistant for the duration of any possible fire event. Smoke ingress may be managed similarly to toxic gas ingress.
Each of these methodologies should be applied to control rooms within buildings and separate control buildings. Control panels on the plant itself cannot be so easily protected; therefore, diversity and redundancy should be applied to ensure that plant control can be maintained in an emergency.
Risk Assessments should be undertaken to demonstrate that primary and secondary (domino) risks are within acceptable limits.[2]
Since the Texas City incident in the USA, the regulator OSHA and the Chemical Safety Board have been educating companies to move their operation centers and Control Rooms outside of any potential blast wave.
This leaves just Field Operators in the danger zone, and companies have followed the philosophy that these people can be evacuated when necessary and that protection from environmental elements such as severe bad weather would be in low occupancy Modular Blast Resistant Buildings.
Buildings outside the incident area have suffered severe damage due to projectiles from within the incident area. A projectile damaged a new Centralized Control Room that had been recently moved from the refinery process area to the Administration Building. The projectile came from a neighbor's nearby Chemical Facility during the over-pressurization of their Ammonia Unit. No one had considered the neighbor's potential to impact the control room.
Hence, it is essential to consider not just the dangers from within but also those that are nearby outside a company’s influence, and this may involve getting Blast Curves and information from the neighboring facility.
Building Security
When considering security for a control room or data center, we have to think very broadly as we consider the threats. In recent history, our focus has been on terrorist attacks on our infrastructure. Protecting buildings against such attacks is a complex problem.
When we considered the World Trade Center attack in 2001, how could a designer possibly protect against two airliners crashing into the buildings?
We also consider one of the United States' most secure buildings, the Pentagon, which has also been subjected to a plane crashing into the building.
We also have to consider many forms of cyber-attacks.
We have witnessed similar attacks on our utility infrastructure as Pipeline operations around the world have become an easy target.
These attacks come from outside as well as domestic attacks. We are raising concerns about security around employees, contractors, and visitors. We have observed the vandalism of the Alaska Pipeline. When considering Criminal Attacks, we must consider trespassers committing vandalism or tampering with vulnerable equipment.
While working in the Petrochemical industry in the UK, I was aware of criminal attacks on our facility from junkyard merchants who sneaked onto the site to steal copper wire. They would cut live cables, sometimes with high voltages, and cut out or burn out sections for the copper cable without concern for what functionality they had just destroyed. I remember one of these systems was emergency backup water for cooling systems across three complexes.
We had someone steal a forklift truck with valuable Titanium valves on a pallet, and they just drove it through the gate as if on a mission, to the gatehouse this was not unusual to see a worker driving a forklift to one of our nearby facilities, no one expected thieves’ to be so bold. I think the ultimate prize was a huge gasoline tanker driven straight out the gate if on-route to filling stations. I wonder how much money they got for all that gasoline.
The funny side of this was that they would come and steal toilets, sinks, soap, and other resalable items; it was quite amusing at the time as the incident report would start. “I am the third shift operator, and at 11.0pm, I went out to the toilet to do my business and found a large hole where the toilet used to be ...”.
Sometimes it is not only thieves that visited us. One time we had Greenpeace activists come up the storm drains and into the facility to cause disruption and vandalism.
Some attacks involve cutting off electricity, phone, or computer networks, cutting off or contaminating water supplies, disrupting cooling systems, bomb threats, and chemical or biological terrorism.
More recent and disturbing security breaches have involved active shooters walking into the plant and taking the control room hostage. It is not that lapses in security are not observed; they are not treated with the seriousness that today’s world would dictate. It has been found that vagrants live on the site, and they find somewhere warm to sleep. They steal uniforms and coveralls and blend in with the workforce, even using cafeteria facilities, showers, etc.
It is difficult to predict how, why, and when these people may attack.
Hence, the scope is extensive and requires that security is considered at the formation of a building plan. We must consider Physical, Cyber, and Human aspects. As part of Conceptual Design, we must consider the Goals and Objectives as part of a countermeasure strategy to address security.
Involve identifying assets, systems, and networks and asses risk (consequences, vulnerability, and threats). Prioritize will need to be set, and then during the design, we will implement programs to protect us from these threats. An essential part of the design is the verification and validation, which should measure the effectiveness of the programs.
Our goal here is to understand the environmental impacts to ensure the health, safety, and comfort of the occupants of the building. Hence, we must protect ourselves from natural disasters – floods, mudslides, torrential rainstorms, criminal acts, terrorists, and accidents.
We address this through access control, secure site perimeter, use of barriers to prevent the passage of vehicles, secure vulnerable openings (e.g., doors, first-floor windows), and install electronic access systems (e.g., parking, elevators, key entry systems). Minimize public entrances into the building; consider the flow of visitors through the building.
Secure critical systems such as IT, Process Control, and mechanical systems). Add surveillance – locate windows and doors to allow for excellent visibility, avoid spaces that permit concealment, define public versus private interior zones, and avoid blocking lines of sight with fencing and landscaping or poorly positioned lighting that may cause glare.
One incident that comes to mind is the US Airways flight that landed on top of another airliner that was on the ground, ready for takeoff on the runway. The ATC gave the US Airways flight permission to land and had forgotten she had put another aircraft on the runway and told them to hold. As we analyze that incident, we can identify many contributing factors that are not unusual for this type of failure. Still, two that stand out to me were the Short-Term Memory (STM) issue, as the Controller forgot what she had done just minutes before the incident, and also the loss of view the Controller had of the runway. Los Angeles did not have ground radar at that time of the event. Unfortunately, the window from the control room that would have provided a view of the aircraft awaiting takeoff was obstructed by a lamp pole that produced glare and blocked the controller’s view.
Design lighting to reinforce natural surveillance. Install intrusion devices and video systems.
The most critical decision we must consider in this section is the location of the control room to these security threats and consideration if a more suitable site is available. Using the environment as part of the protection system while ensuring the surrounding area does not contribute to problems.
Convenience
In the early days of control room operations, it was not only convenient that the control room was next to the operating equipment, but at that time, it was also essential. The panel operator used to perform control duties and then go into the field to make further physical adjustments. It was not untypical for an operator to spend 80% of their time outside with the physical equipment. Many plant operations only required a single operator at night, and when he was out doing his rounds, the control system was left unsupervised.
Operators learned to listen to the sounds of the equipment and the process, and their ears were often a critical diagnostic tool in identifying abnormal conditions. Supervisors often lived in the control room with the operators and sometimes engineers and managers as well. It was convenient having the whole production team housed together.
However, after years of operating like this, the operations finally became computerized, which had many benefits. Still, it also suffered from some negative impacts, such as organizational accidents, which involve sophisticated technology such as computer systems and people.
After several disasters, many fires, explosions, and accidents, regulators have concluded that non-essential personnel should be moved away from the process equipment and housed in a safe zone.
The first people to be removed were the managers, the planners, then the engineers, and finally, the control room operators.
It is now more convenient to build the control rooms near the administration buildings allowing close access to these people, the planners, supervisors, engineers, and managers.
One of the significant displacements caused by this initiative was Supervisors who have an active role in the control room and the field personnel. Because the control room operators were often the most senior personnel, the supervisors focused their attention mainly on the field with the newer inexperienced operators and the maintenance personnel.
Some control rooms need to be physically close to the hazard to allow a view of the equipment. We naturally think of air traffic controllers who benefitted from a view of the runways. However, this is changing as ground radar has been implemented at many of our airports, allowing air traffic controllers a picture of the airport ground movement providing a better view, especially at night time.
If it is still more convenient to have the control room local to the field, the building may need to be hardened or blast-proofed to meet the new design standards. However, this adds high costs to a project and has limitations.
We still have many operations that are operated by a single operator who has inside and outside operator duties. Just a single operator often staffs effluent Treatment Plants or Refinery Blending Operations, small chemical processes, and plant utilities. The risk for many of these buildings is low, and a robust design is often sufficient to house these people.
Maintenance
Maintenance generally has two roles associated with control rooms, the first being actual maintenance of the building and its equipment, such as HVAC equipment, electrical systems, and computer IT and process control systems.
Many control room operators still manage permitting and authorization but, hopefully, are very infrequent. However, this is a poor practice and should be carried out by outside personnel local to the workplace.
In the design of the building, we must consider parking maintenance vehicles, access for large replacement or new equipment, and the design of workspaces for maintenance personnel.
The other role is permission to work in an area on specific equipment. This requires a permit to work, which, when the control room was local to the units, involved maintenance coming into the control room for a Permit to Work (PTW) authorization. This was very distracting for the control room operators, so many companies isolated the permitting to a dedicated part of the control building away from the control room and was manned by field operators or a Chief Operator or Supervisor.
When the field operators who were working with maintenance would come into the control room for a chat and information exchange, this would cause a disturbance and interruption.
When the field operator is busy doing a task, the maintenance people will hang out in the control room, waiting for them to return to the control room. Again causing a disturbance to the control operator. When these operators used to get stressed, they would clear the control room but not before reaching significant stress levels and the potential for human error.
In the more modern designs, the control room is relocated away from the plant, processes, and equipment. So now maintenance works just with field operators for authorization to work and direction, and coordination of the maintenance activity in the form of planned maintenance or more disruptive breakdown maintenance. When this happens, the field operator must keep the control room operators aware of everything happening. Another topic for our SMART Board application will discuss in the communications section.
Hence, most maintenance usually is well planned and organized by both maintenance personnel and operations. However, sometimes opportunities are created, and both maintenance and operations have to scramble to take advantage of these opportunities.
Operations do not favor this work as they must prepare the equipment and make it safe for the maintenance worker.
If permitting is brought into a control room, it must be designed to minimize distraction, manage people flow through the building, and also protect the integrity of employee-only zones from contractors and visitors. Often involve dedicated access doors both in and out, preventing people traffic jams—with dedicated rooms adjacent to the control room for permitting and Lock-Out Tag-Out (LOTO).
Visibility requirements
As stated earlier, under certain circumstances, it is preferable to have a control room with a view of what the control operator is controlling. Things to consider are what is visible during daylight and what can be seen at night time.
When considering windows, we must account for glare from lighting or daylight sunshine. Tinted, slopped windows can help. The project team must decide if blast protection is required using blast or ballistic-resistant glazing. However, do not place too much confidence in these. Past explosions have shown that these may not break but often get sucked out of their frames by a blast.
Having a large glass window will have an impact on energy costs, and solar heat transfer may cause discomfort in the control room.
In the processing industry, windows are not recommended if there is a potential for fires and explosions. Most windows that have been installed in previous control rooms are more often than not permanently covered with blinds or similar sunlight filters, which restrict viewing. On an earlier project, I was against installing windows due to the close adjacency of a chlorine plant. However, coding insists that windows be provided. However, whenever you go into the control, as I predicted, the blind covers the window.
They do provide a psychological impact to primary users, one that can be simulated with a good camera, LED display, and window frame. This solution is often better because it provides some visual display at night time, unlike the window.
As stated earlier, windows also offer a potential security problem unless they are designed to be hardened. Increasing the glazing area to provide daylighting can be incompatible with the desire to decrease glazing to minimize glass hazards. During an incident at an oil refinery, one of the significant accidents was a Supervisor injured by the glass in the control room.
A few years ago, I met this Shift Supervisor who nearly lost his life during an incident in a neighboring unit, which was several miles away. He was in the control room and heard the noise from the troubled Cat Cracking Unit at the Norco New Orleans Refinery; he went to the door to look outside and was met halfway by the glass from the control room door. His face and throat were badly cut, and his life-threatening injuries were only mitigated by the fast actions of control room operators who managed his bleeding and the on-site emergency medical team that saved his life. Today, that man is scared for his life and asked me please reduce glass in control rooms, and I have never forgotten that.
Considering the layout and the view, the direction of the sun both morning and night and finally, how close the control room will be to the process. I was asked to look at a mobile control room, which was used to monitor a copper mine. When operations moved to a different part of the mine, the control room was moved to provide the best view of the mine vehicles. This is not too common, most places find an ideal or best possible location, and when the view is obscured, they rely on good camera technology to provide views.
Sometimes people put too much emphasis on the need for a view. They are often driven to do this because we have always done it that way in the past. When these control rooms have not moved, we often experience more advantages than disadvantages, and the loss of view is mitigated by good (cheap) camera technology.
Communications
One of the positive benefits of local unit control rooms was the face-to-face communication between control room operators and field operators. When the control rooms have moved away from the operating units’ radios, PA Systems, and wireless phones have provided limited but adequate communications. I say adequate because it is working at many facilities around the world.
It fails because operators refuse to discuss some things across a public address system, and they will resort to only passing some messages on a phone or dedicated landline. They don’t want to be overheard by Managers, Supervisors, and often other operators. Secrecy, no, but often insecurity to talk about what they should know in public and not wanting the repercussions of admitting they don’t know or have forgotten something.
Often it is hard to hear, and having that face-to-face meeting can resolve many miscommunications and errors. It was a common practice for operators to huddle before doing a significant task and comparing plans and reinforcing who would do what and when. They follow procedures, but it is not often designated who does what! So they divide it up together in the huddle, then go out and do the tasks.
You may think that this process should be formalized, but it isn’t, mainly because the skill levels across shifts are very different. Hence, every shift team does the tasks differently depending on who has trained them and their level of understanding and sometimes on their fitness level to achieve some tasks which could involve climbing and some very physical work.
With this in mind, I have been recommending the use of SMART Board Technology to provide a video conference and collaborative viewing environment where procedures, drawings, and other documents can interactively be shared, discussed together, and modified or marked up if necessary, providing an electronic audit trail.
In the Field Shelter, we provide an interactive smart board where field operators can make notes regarding equipment status, much like they do today on traditional whiteboards. With this technology, they can share that information with a centralized control room and vice versa.
Permits can also be shared, and who is working in what area on a map of the unit—allows control room operators to increase their situation awareness levels.
They can video conference, provide one-to-one communications or group communication, and they can have and share access to any electronic documents; this is so important. An excellent example of this collaboration is when a complicated piece of equipment needs valves to be line-up or has to be prepared, and it is different from typical line-ups may be because of loss of equipment or broken lines. The drawings can be viewed together, marked up together, and an agreed procedure developed to achieve success.
All of this is recorded and updated after the event. They provide online Management of Change (MOC) protocol and an electronic audit trail.
This technology provides a reliable backup to failed radio transmission and can be exploited for safety meetings, toolbox meetings, and shift change meetings.
As stated earlier, default communications equipment usually involves the use of Analogue Radio Systems, telephone lines, pagers, PA Systems, and cell phones. This technology is migrating to digital equivalents; analog radios are being replaced by VOIP systems; cell phones are limited because of the price of Intrinsically Safe product availability. Cost-effective IS cases are solving this for the phones; PA Systems are not as popular as they were 30 years ago but still exist on some sites.
We are starting to see the development and use of wearable PCs with video conferencing features enter the workplace. The challenge is finding a robust, intrinsically safe product that works well within all the steelwork in many of our facilities. We have seen success with these products offshore, but to date, they are slow to impact onshore facilities.
Optimization
Optimization under this chapter section of “Location” has nothing to do with process optimization but optimization of people. Who needs that face-to-face communication we discussed, and which console operators must collaborate regularly? Who should be located within the control suite, and how close should the control suite be to managers, engineers, supervisors, or the physical equipment?
The centralized control rooms with multiple operators require more thought about which consoles should be adjacent to improve communication and collaboration. Which ones would just distract each other and should be separated or isolated?
We can also look at which rooms should have primary or secondary adjacencies to improve the workflow and use within the control suite.
What functionality should be part of the control suite? For example, for many years, laboratories associated with a unit were part of the control room.
Today with modern laboratory systems, they should not be part of the control suite because they would compromise the control room if an accident occurred.
In the old days, it was part of the control room because the inside/outside operators did all the jobs, including taking samples and running them through lab equipment such as Gas Chromatographs.
As labs became more remote, sample results were sent to the control room by fax, computer report, and other unique solutions several times daily. My favorite was a camera pointing to a chair, and several times a day, the lab rat used to put a report on the chair. It was read in the control room through a monitor connected to this camera.
However, today we have dedicated lab-trained personnel (lab rats;-) who are dedicated to running samples and producing lab reports. These end up in a system (LIMS) that is available to the control room IT system instantaneously.
So, under this chapter heading, we consider optimization of the location of the building based on safety, building security, convenience, maintenance, visibility requirements (view), communications and collaboration, and optimization needs.
The optimization of primary and secondary users of the control room facilities is a critical success factor.
In a refinery with multiple operators who impact each other, it is vital to have a proper methodology for determining to design the console layout. From knowledge of the processes and the Process Flow Diagrams, together with interviews of key personnel, we develop an adjacency matrix with a scoring system of: -
1. required adjacency,
2. preferred adjacency,
3. neutral adjacency (no impact), and finally,
4. a negative adjacency. In other words, putting these together would be a distraction.
Help from ISO Standards
The International Standard ISO 11064, sections 1 - 7, provides guidance on other considerations to take into account when fixing the location of a site for a control room.
The standards and guidelines provide very practical help on this topic.
Other considerations will be the analysis of the underground of the proposed site, including pipes, cabling, old structures, and the suitability of the soil for supporting a structure over headlines and other obstacles.
Ian Nimmo
President User Centered Design Services Inc.
www.mycontrolroom.com [email protected]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esso_Longford_gas_explosion
[2] http://www.hse.gov.uk/comah/sragtech/techmeascontrol.htm Control room design
This Technical Measures Document refers to codes, standards, and best practices applicable to the design of control rooms.