Safepark

The Art of Working Properly

Safepark - the history!

In the early years of this millenium some researcher noticed that large chemical site were transforming from single owner sites to multi owner sites - almost a park of chemical plants - and that presented new challenges for emergency response and process safety. These researcher submitted a research proposal to the EU to investigate and find solutions for the challenges these conglomerates presented, and that project was called Safepark. The domain safepark.dk was acquired to host information about this new research project. Unfortunately, the proposal was unsuccessful.

A few years latter I - Niels Jensen - was fired from my job as associate professor at DTU, and a Norwegian friend suggested I set up a consultancy. The name of that consultancy became Safepark Consultancy, which was a registrered company in Denmark for a few years, and this website was then created to share my views of process safety. My attitude to safety was formed during my early years of employment with Imperial Oil in Sarnia, Canada and later honed when I in the late nineties became the secretary of the safety committee at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby. In the mid nineties I toke over the process safety teaching - dating back to the early 80's - at the Department of Chemical Engineering and transformed that from a Danish only course to an English course for the at the time increasing number of international students coming to DTU.

Basically I continue to believe, that process safety is the art of working properly. Working properly means taking a scientific approach to solving your health, safety and environmental (HSE) challenges. Art is finding a common sense basis in your company culture to achieve the ultimate goal of process safety: That everyone are certain to return to loved ones at the end of a workday without injury. This I learned from the leader of the Chemical Valley Emergency Coordinating Organisation (CVECO) in Sarnia, during a chat about board meeting at PetroCanada about what process safety means.

All the years this site have benefited from the use of first Google Sites and later Google New Sites, and the improvements over the years. Today, my NJVIEWS blog have been transformed from a blog about process safety to a blog about MyeloDysplastic Syndromes (MDS) - a bone marrow disease I was diagnosed with at my 23rd wedding anniversary in 2005. Now also part of the site is a bit of information about the churches I have attended or just visited across the world.

Important learnings from war games

Control system cybersecurity expert Joe Weiss report from the 2019 Naval War College Cyber War Game - observations and learnings

Read more here!

Is Grindsted the Danish Love Canal?

On June 20th this the Danish weekly newspaper “Weekendavisen” (link to Danish language website of the weekly) published a report by freelance writer Jakob Jensen called “Alas, how changed!” (link to Danish original behind paywall). When reading Jakob Jensen’s report about this town in the middle of Jutland, I started thinking about the Love Canal dumpsite at Niagara Falls, USA. Read more about the pollution at Love Canal her. I could not stop speculating whether Grindsted the Danish equivalent of Love Canal?

Grindsted is a city of about 10,000 inhabitants about 60 km from the west coast of Jutland. One of the larger employers of this town is a chemical factory, which years - with the approval of the government - dumped chemical waste containing chlorinated solvents, heavy metals, cyanide, mercury on at least four different sites in the city and also at Kærgård Klitplantage. In the city the material seeped into the creak, and at Kærgård it seeped into the North Sea.

Read some excerpts of Jakob Jensen's report from Grindsted here, and judge for yourself if my headline is correct or not. Send any comments to niels.jensen@safepark.dk .