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Making Process Safety personal

I have been fortunate enough to have facilitated a series of process safety workshops for managers and supervisors of oil and gas facilities around the world.  In these sessions we usually get a senior leader to kick-off the session by sharing with the group why they think process safety is important.  We try to coach the leader to not just repeat the corporate party line but to share an incident from their past career that brought home to them why process safety is personally top of their agenda.  Unfortunately, for senior leaders with 20+ years in the industry few do not have incidents they can recount where death or injury of colleagues has personally affected them. Many of these stories leave the room in hushed silence, its like a room of 40 people taking a collective gulp. 

From a workshop perspective, this sets up the event perfectly and focusses the group on the importance and impact of the subject. But I often wonder what my personal story is.  As a consultant I have visited many facilities.  Often I will get a tour of the site (I enjoy donning my borrowed flame retardant overalls, hard hat, steel-toed boots and safety goggles) but I have never worked on a facility or been responsible for a team working on one. So I cannot do a really authentic personal story apart from the one below.

AZF chemical facility, Toulouse:  I was working in the French city of Toulouse for an aerospace client based close to the airport.  It was a mere 10 days after  September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the USA.   There was a pervading sense of unease as those attacks involved civil aircraft and a severe impact on air travel and thereby my client's business was feared.  I was in meeting when suddenly the windows blew inwards and we heard a load bang.  Everyone rushed outside (in hindsight that could have been unwise) and like all Toulousain we feared we were under attack.  In fact it was an explosion in the fertilizer plant in the southern part of the city (so 4 or 5 miles away) that killed 29 people and wounded 2,500.  Naturally, terrorism was suspected but it turned out to be a process safety incident.  The explosion affected he whole city.  I think few people in La Ville Rose did not have friends or family who were casualties.  The wife of one of my client team was injured and that impacted us. Along with the deaths and injuries this explosion caused circa € 1.5 billion euros of damage, a result of the plant's proximity to the city centre.

Some who have been at these workshops I facilitate may remember my "harbinger of doom" story.  I won't share it here as I would have to reveal client names and also it can be taken as a bit flippant, which it isn't, as it about seeing the internal impact on an organisation of major incidents.

Having stories to tell about process safety incidents is important for leaders in the industry as they are one tool to help tackle the natural slide into complacency and "risk normalization" that can happen with staff that live and/or work every day on oil and gas facilities.







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