The Hidden Crisis in Barrier Management: Why Your Safety Systems Don’t Know What Your Plant is Doing

The Black Hole

Most oil and gas companies operate with a critical blind spot in their safety management systems: they cannot effectively track barrier failures in real-time. While enterprise systems like SAP contain valuable maintenance and equipment data, extracting meaningful barrier status information remains a manual, labor-intensive process that few organizations have truly mastered.

The problem starts with data architecture. Barrier failures are scattered across multiple systems; work orders in SAP, incident reports in separate databases, and field observations that may never make it into any formal system. Even when companies implement dedicated barrier downtime reporting, it requires substantial effort to reconcile this against actual equipment status in SAP. The result? Your barrier management system is always operating with stale, incomplete data.

The Perception Gap: When Engineers and Operations See Different Realities

There’s a more insidious problem lurking beneath the data integration issues: a fundamental disconnect in how different groups perceive and report barrier degradation.

Consider a failed solenoid on a pneumatic shutdown valve, a leaking check valve in a deluge system, or a pressure control valve (PCV) malfunction on a pneumatic line. To a process safety engineer, these are clear barrier failures—critical safety systems operating in a degraded state that require immediate documentation and risk assessment.

But to operations personnel focused on maintaining production, these might be viewed as minor maintenance items—nuisances to be fixed during the next turnaround, not safety-critical failures requiring immediate escalation and permit restrictions.

This perception gap has two devastating consequences:

First, you systematically undercount your actual barrier failures. If only the most obvious, complete system failures get reported as barrier degradation while component-level failures are dismissed as routine maintenance, your barrier management system is painting a dangerously optimistic picture of your facility’s actual safety posture.

Second, without accurate, real-time barrier status data, your other safety systems operate blindly.

The Permit-to-Work Disconnect: When Your Left Hand Doesn’t Know What Your Right Hand is Doing

Your facility is not a static entity; it’s a living, morphing, changing organism. Equipment fails, maintenance happens, systems get isolated, barriers go down for repairs, and all of this happens continuously, shift by shift, day by day.

Yet most electronic Permit-to-Work (e-PTW) systems operate in isolation from this dynamic reality. They cannot track what’s actually happening in your plant in real-time. The e-PTW system doesn’t know that:

• The firewater system in Area C is down for valve replacement
• The gas detection grid in the process area has three detectors offline
• The emergency shutdown system is in bypass for testing
• The deluge system for Tank 103 has been isolated

Now imagine this scenario: A maintenance crew requests a hot work permit for welding in an area. The e-PTW system checks its static rules—is this a classified area? Is there a valid gas test? Has the work been authorized? The permit gets approved and work proceeds.

But what the system doesn’t know is that the firewater system for that area has been down for the past 12 hours.

Hot work begins. Sparks from welding ignite nearby flammable material. The fire spreads. It catches onto a worker’s coverall. Workers rush to activate the deluge system or grab a fire hose. Nothing. The firewater system is still isolated for maintenance. What should have been a contained incident escalates into a catastrophe.

This Scenario Isn’t Hypothetical

In May 2025, a fire on Chevron’s Benguela Belize Lobito Tomboco (BBLT) platform offshore Angola resulted in three fatalities and seventeen injuries during scheduled annual maintenance SAFETY4SEAWorld Oil. The fire occurred on the cellar deck of the platform at approximately 03:10 hours Maritime Executive. While the specific root causes are still under investigation, this incident exemplifies the heightened risks that exist during maintenance operations when normal safety systems may be in degraded states.

Read more about the BBLT incident

Could better barrier tracking and permit integration have prevented or mitigated this tragedy? We may never know definitively, but the systemic issues are clear: when barrier status isn’t visible to permit systems, when operations and safety don’t share a common view of what constitutes a critical failure, and when real-time plant status remains invisible to work authorization processes, we create the conditions for catastrophic failure.

Mapping Barrier Failures to Major Incidents

The IChemE Lessons Learned Database provides sobering evidence of how barrier failures contribute to major incidents across our industry. Their analysis maps root causes—including maintenance factors, operations factors, alarm management failures, and management of change deficiencies—across dozens of catastrophic events from Piper Alpha to Macondo to Texas City.

View the IChemE Major Incident vs Root Cause Matrix

What becomes immediately apparent when reviewing this data is that most major incidents don’t result from single-point failures. They result from the confluence of multiple barrier failures—design issues, maintenance deficiencies, procedural violations, and management system gaps all aligning at the worst possible moment. The classic “Swiss cheese” model of accident causation isn’t just theory; it’s documented reality across our industry’s worst disasters.

What Needs to Change

Effective barrier management requires three fundamental shifts:

1. Real-Time Integration: Your barrier status must be visible across all safety-critical systems. When a barrier goes down, this should automatically update in your PTW system, your alarm management system, your personnel tracking system, and anywhere else that safety decisions are being made.

2. Unified Barrier Definition: Engineers and operations must share a common understanding of what constitutes a barrier failure. This requires clear performance standards, documented criteria for degraded states, and a culture where reporting degradation is valued regardless of its perceived severity.

3. Predictive Risk Assessment: Your PTW system should not just check static rules—it should perform dynamic risk assessment based on actual, current plant status. What barriers are available right now? What simultaneous operations are occurring? What is the cumulative risk picture for this specific work at this specific time?

The Path Forward

The technology to solve these problems exists. But it takes a lot of effort since SAP is and has been the cornerstone of Plant Maintanance system worldwide.But we beleive all of them are the same working off codes and layers just to get to barrier failures

The question is whether we’ll fix the system before or after the next BBLT, the next Texas City, the next Macondo.