John Schaefer
Risk/Reliability Engineer; ABS Consulting
Mr. Schaefer is a risk/reliability engineer at ABS Consulting with more than 5 years of experience in hazard analysis and risk assessments of chemical, petrochemical, oil and gas, and pulp and paper facilities. His experience also includes an additional 10 years of experience in assessing and mitigating the effects of combustible dust explosions.
His experience includes the development of Risk Management Plans (RMPlans) in accordance with EPA’s RMP rule (40 CFR part 68) for a wide variety of clients. This work involved performing offsite consequence analyses (OCA) for worst-case and alternative release scenarios (source term, dispersion, and fire/explosion modeling) including the estimation of the scenario impacts on surrounding public and environmental receptors.
Mr. Schaefer has also conducted combustible dust hazard assessments in various industries to help clients evaluate facility conformance and dust mitigation strategies to generally accepted industry standards (e.g., NFPA). He has also worked with clients to understand and prepare for OSHA’s combustible dust National Emphasis Program (NEP), CPL 03-00-008. In addition, he has experience in the design and development of equipment to collect and/or mitigate combustible dusts and their associated hazards (i.e., explosion vents, explosion isolation valves, explosion suppression systems) in accordance with NFPA 68, Standard on Explosion Protection by Deflagration Venting, and NFPA 69,Standard on Explosion Prevention Systems. He has assisted in the collection and testing of various combustible dusts to assess their explosive characteristics in accordance with industry standards (e.g. ASTM).
Mr. Schaefer has assisted in and documented qualitative and quantitative hazard analyses using a variety of techniques (failure modes and effects analysis and hazard and operability analysis, and layer of protection analysis) to satisfy the requirements or the RMP and PSM (29 CFR 1910.119) regulations.