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Urgent!
Examine and Re-Evaluate Safety Culture and Processes
The boards of directors and executives of oil and chemical companies
throughout
the world are being asked to re-examine their safety cultures to
determine if they
are sufficiently investing in the people, procedures, and equipment
necessary to make
their workplaces safe from catastrophic accidents.
The request comes from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard
Investigation Board
(CSB), which sees an opportunity for review and reform on a
worldwide scale in
the wake of last month’s release of the “Report of the BP U.S.
Refineries Independent
Safety Review Panel.”
An independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial
chemical accidents,
the CSB looks into all aspects of chemical accidents, including
physical
causes such as equipment failure as well as inadequacies in safety
regulations, standards,
and management systems. Its request for review is based on findings
that
significant process safety culture issues exist at BP refineries,
saying that even
though it had improved its personal injury rate before the Texas
City explosion that
killed 15 in March 2005, BP has material process safety deficiencies
at all five of its
U.S. refineries.
While chastising BP for its safety deficiencies, the CSB is
commending the BP Re-
fineries Independent Safety Review Panel, chaired by former
Secretary of State James
A. Baker III, for its diligence in producing a comprehensive report
on BP’s safety
management and culture.
The panel was formed in response to the CSB’s urgent recommendation
of August
2005 after two subsequent incidents put employees and the
surrounding community
of BP’s Texas City refinery in further danger.
Just three months after the fatal explosion in March, the Texas City
refinery experienced
a serious hydrogen fire in its resid hydrotreater unit that caused
$30 million
in property damage and forced residents to take shelter. Two weeks
later,
another incident related to mechanical integrity in the refinery’s
gas oil hydrotreater
forced another community shelter-in-place alert. This series of
events prompted the
CSB to issue its first-ever, urgent safety recommendation, calling
on BP to convene
an independent panel to assess safety culture and oversight at all
five of its
North American refineries.
The report released last month includes specific and extensive
recommendations
(see page 6) to improve BP’s corporate safety oversight, corporate
safety
culture, and corporate and site process safety management systems
relating to its
five U.S. refineries.
The report demonstrates that the “serious concerns” the CSB voiced
in August
2005 about BP’s safety practices — in the early phases of the
accident investigation
— were indeed justified. There is no doubt that the issues of safety
culture and safety
management identified in this report are serious and warrant
immediate action by
BP, its executives, and its board of directors.
However, Secretary Baker said the panel is “under no illusion that
the deficiencies
we have identified are unique to BP. If other refining and chemical
companies consider
our recommendations and apply them, we believe that those workplaces
will be
safer and that future tragedies like the Texas City accident can be
avoided.”
Corporate leadership at the highest level is accountable for the
safe operation of
facilities that use hazardous chemicals. Safety culture is created
at the top, and
when it fails there, it fails workers far down the line. That is
what happened at BP,
said the CSB.
After it’s had the opportunity to review the panel’s report in
detail, the CSB anticipates
it will vote on closing the August 2005 urgent safety
recommendation. The
CSB’s final report on the root causes of the March 2005 explosion is
in the final
drafting stages and is expected to be released on March 20, 2007, at
a public meeting
in Texas City. It will propose recommendations at the national level
to prevent
similar tragedies in the future.
It should make for interesting reading, and should be mandatory for
the operators
of all oil and chemical processing plants.
Thanks and good luck.
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