OSHA Deputy Assistant Secretary Jordan Barab leveled a very direct judgment against petroleum and petrochemical processing companies at the NPRA conference last week. He did not mince words.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
"Your workers are dying on the job and it has to stop""Stop boasting about your safety records when you're literally putting out fires. You're undermining your credibility"
He called on industry leaders to learn from their own mistakes and those of others. He further called on them to share best practices and and success stories. New metrics were also a topic of discussion since current metrics are not preventing death and disaster. Mr. Barab concluded by urging companies to promote a real and lasting cultural transformation in the area of PSM.
Can improving metrics and scorecards help avert disasters? There is a need to systematize Process Safety Management from the initial HAZOP to the decommissioning of the plant. What I have come across quite often in my daily conversations with reliability professionals is that too many of the efforts that impact Process Safety Management are run independently. Risk based inspections are being done by one set of engineers. Safety instrumented systems management is done by yet another group. Inspection management is being carried out by a group that is not connected to either of these.
One of the more troubling findings Mr. Barab refers to was that findings and concerns are not being communicated across corporations, throughout industry, or even within different units within the same refinery.
The problem doesn't seem to be limited to the process industry. This seems to appear in the medical industry, education, government, and heaven forbid, homeland security and intelligence.
There are 16 different US federal agencies that perform intelligence analytics. In the weeks and months prior to 9/11, parts of the system were blinking red. But the disparate red blinking lights did not coalesce and form a comprehensive warning that may have averted the loss of life and catastrophic events of that day. Even though parts of the system were blinking red no one was able to connect the dots between all of the available pieces of intelligence.
(Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges, Andrew McAfee)This is a poignant example of what disconnected information and data can result in. If they had been able to connect the dots they may have been able to perceive the nature of the threat more clearly and prevent the attacks from occurring.
With all due respect and sensitivity I use this example because it is hard to ignore. It demonstrates, through an unforgettable catastrophe, what occurs in the asset-intensive industry in terms of asset performance. Are there parts of the system that are blinking red in one department that are not signaling trouble to other departments?
