Tackle complacency to avoid disasters
21 Jan 2014
Health and Safety Executive chairman Judith Hackett says organisational change and brave engineers are needed to stop the complacency that leads to site catastrophes.
Major hazard sites in the chemical and oil & gas sectors have prided themselves on their outstanding performance in personal safety for years.
They have encouraged reporting of near misses, investigating many near misses and very minor injuries in depth to understand the causes.
Behavioural safety programmes are embedded in their thinking. But the harsh reality is that holding the handrails, wearing ppe, and avoiding slips and trips onsite may well be successful in driving down injury rates, but it will do very little to address issues of process safety – and it is process safety issues that lead to disasters like Buncefield, Texas City, Macondo and more.
To prevent catastrophes there are a number of lessons to be learned.
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