Faster Than the Disaster: BP Texas City 19 Years Later

March 23rd will mark the 19th anniversary of the BP Texas City refinery disaster. 15 people lost their lives that day.? None needed to die. I write about this incident every year because people and organizations forget. We need reminders.

My career in safety started with this disaster. I was assigned as a consultant to help BP understand the cultural causes and find ways to prevent recurrence.?

One of the findings was that leaders knew that Texas City was a powder keg waiting to explode. There was a saying among leaders that if you were assigned a role in Texas City, you needed to “move faster than the disaster.” What people meant was that you needed to punch your ticket and move on before something bad happened under your watch.

While there was a myriad of causes for the disaster, I’d like to focus on organizations that know there is a disaster waiting to happen and put their heads in the sand.

Some thoughts:

One person knows exactly what will happen and why.? Their voices get silenced.? At BP, it was the existence of blow down stacks and the refusal to upgrade their flare systems.? This was widely known and consistently ignored. More recently, at Boeing, it was John Barnett and his emails proclaiming 737 production problems. John recently took his own life.

There is a breakdown of trust between the workers and the leaders. The workers know what’s going on. Management may know, too. However, they make it abundantly clear that they are not interested or capable of addressing the issue by their lack of response. The feedback loop breaks down and trust disintegrates.

Leaders fail to take a stand and put career over conscious. Bob Ebeling, a Morton Thiokol engineer working on the space shuttle Challenger is an exception. ?Bob tried to stop the launch. NASA overruled them. ?

In my subsequent years as a safety consultant, here’s what I’ve learned:

1.????? Your career success is not worth a single life. Ever. Don’t confuse commercial success with overall success.

2.????? Take a stand for doing what’s right.? Don’t buckle under pressure. If you’re tempted to do so, see item 1.

3.????? Your job as a leader is to find the budget you need to mitigate safety risks.? Look for ‘catalytic’ actions that reduce risk significantly instead of eliminating it completely. If the budget isn’t granted, see item 1.

4.????? Ask for and welcome bad news. Celebrate the messenger, don’t vilify them.

5.????? Seek out, listen, and respond to your people. It takes years to build trust and moments to destroy it.

6.????? Pay attention to the organizational language.? Phrases that allude to pending problems are ‘weak signals’ that need to be addressed.

7.????? Defer to expertise.? Your technical people know what’s going on.? They likely have been silenced at some point. It’s your job to re-engage them.

8.????? Don’t drink the organization’s Kool-Aid. If it feels too risky, it probably is. Use ‘red teams’ or peer reviews to challenge your risk assessments and your confidence in the risk mitigation approaches.

9.????? When you look at your scorecards, challenge the greens and deal with the reds. The risk is in the stuff the organization thinks is okay.

10.? Never confuse your personal safety success with process (system) safety success.? The same goes for injury rates and SIF (STKY).? These are different metrics and will lull organizations into complacency. ??

What other advice do you have?

In memory of Jacobs Engineering and Construction, LLC 嘉科工程 employees:

Bolton – Cruz - Herrera – Hogan – Hunnings – King-Linsenbardt - Ramos - Rodrigues -Rowe, J. – Rowe, L. -Smith – Taylor – Thomas – White

In memory of Boeing employee John Barnett.

If you are interested in building your executive team’s safety capabilities, let’s discuss my ‘Reflective Learning’ workshops. These sessions review critical executive competencies through assessment and critical incident reviews.

SafetyAnd Consulting Associates, Inc.

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