Evolving Safety Intelligently

Off lately, our country has witnessed some process accidents that have not only claimed human lives but has left us appalled questioning the nature of safety culture.

Through our work with companies seeking to climb up the safety staircase, combined with our personal experiences, we were able to summarize the possible failure mechanisms behind such mishaps. However, our views are limited to the perception of us as a company and developed over the detailed study across the available resources. We come as helping hands and not the blaming individuals.

1.  LG Polymers Styrene Gas Leakage

On 7th May, 2020, styrene gas leaked around 2.30 am from a chemical factory called LG Polymers India Pvt Ltd in RR Venkatapuram village near Vizag. The gas leak from the factory killed at least 11 people and adversely affected the livelihood present in the surroundings. Additionally, more than 3,000 people living in nearby villages were evacuated.

What happened?

As per officials, styrene, a synthetic chemical, was believed to have leaked followed by a fire that began while workers were preparing to restart the plant after it was closed during India's coronavirus lockdown.

Styrene monomer was being used at the manufacturing plant to produce expandable plastics. The storage requirement of a styrene monomer requires temperature below 17℃. Owing to its nature, it needs to be stored in a temperature-controlled tank. However, ambient temperatures at this time of the year in India are quite elevated and since the gas was not being stored in a temperature-controlled environment, it caused pressure to build up and led the valve to break, resulting in gas leakage. Shockingly, it was found that there were other facilities too that were vulnerable to leakage at a much larger scale.

2.    Boiler blast at Cuddalore

On 7th May, 2020, a boiler at an NLC India thermal power plant exploded leading to a brief spurt of blaze causing serious burn injuries to two contract workers and comparatively milder wounds to six others, who had to be hospitalized.

The only reason out for public is that the boiler exploded due to an increase in internal pressure, while the contract workers were working at a height of about 32m.

3.  Raigarh gas leak

On 6th May 2020, the gas leak at a paper mill in Raigarh lead to the injury of workers. Seven workers of a paper mill were exposed to gas leak while cleaning a tank in the mill. Three of them are in critical condition.

Officials said the possible reason is untrained labour and lack of safety equipment for the tank cleaning work.

4.  Gas leakage at Kagaznagar paper factory

On 11th May 2020, a minor gas leakage occurred at Sirpur Paper Mills (SPM), Sirpur, Kagaznagar town in Komarambheem Asifabad district, Telangana. The gas leakage left one worker hospitalized, the other workers on the premises remained unaffected. Three months ago, three migrant workers died and six others were injured in a mishap at the same factory when a new boiler plant being commissioned crashed on them.

Four incidents occurred within a period of mere 3-4 days. This largely questions our existing safety culture. Exactly the question that we asked ourselves a few years ago and established Oleo to work towards the digitization of health and safety and help companies adopt a more behaviour-based safety approach.

Our views on the above accidents narrow down to the following observations:

a.    Improper Reporting: Immediate reporting and continuous volume monitoring through observations could have brought in the severity of hazard beforehand to the management.

b.    Deficient Approach to Safety: 3 out of the above 4 incidents are completely based on the lack of administrative control and the human factor. The perception of safety is limited to a set of regulatory directives and danger is considered as a part of the job. It is clearly evident that either the workforce was not aware of the hazards or if they were, then the controls were not in place. And in both situations, the top management had no clue about it. They blindly trust the regulatory compliance reports developed by their team manually.

c.    Non-Recursive Judgement: There is a well-defined set of steps wherein, firstly the worker doesn’t think that safety is important, instead that danger is a part of the job, secondly, the manager/supervisor feels they have to compel and force their subordinates/workers to work with compliance to existing SOP, and thirdly, the management thinks everything is going good because their end result of manually fabricated safety reports is keeping them within compliance, which is actually being pseudo-compliant.

Surprisingly, these reasons are not new to the Indian scenario of accidents, it has been observed that up to 80% of incidents start with or occur due to human factor and lack of administrative controls. And this can be traced back to the behaviour of the employees and employer towards safety. The question remains: How is their behaviour when nobody is watching?

People, including both employer and employee, must believe that business performance and safety performance are intertwined. Everyone in the system has a role to play, and everyone can help prevent accidents. It takes a collective body of knowledge as well as individual efforts to resolve issues. We found that companies need to set the right tone and expectations for safe behaviours, create an environment that motivates people to look for and speak up about hazards, and provide systems for acting promptly when a hazard is identified. However, their effectiveness ultimately depends on the individual employee’s ability to recognize hazards and find the controls in place.

Oleo recognizes this very philosophy and we believe that the key to changing this culture is to let it evolve intelligently with the help of new technology. We aim to take the workforce through a journey of behaviour-based safety via adapting from reactive to proactive to predictive and lastly to generative.

As a matter of fact, in a few companies we implemented our product and observed that due to ease to use and gamification, employees actively participated in learning more about safety, and applied to recognize and control genuine hazards in real-time and continuous reporting. This, in turn, made workplace risks visible before they could cause safety incidents and were managed smoothly, enabling the company to increase overall employee engagement and safety management to a whole new level.

Even the present upheaval of the world economy has shifted the focus towards the symbiotic relation of organizational health and behavioural safety to the overall efficiency of the processes across all sectors. To help companies answer the question of whether they are prepared for this pandemic or future waves of the disease, we have also developed a product focusing on restoring operations amidst the COVID pandemic by implementing am employee health and safety strategy.

If you think your company can benefit from such a solution, you can drop me a note to [email protected].