Danger Culture/Safety Culture
Ross, Benjamin
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Danger Culture/Safety Culture BENJAMIN ROSS Underwater drilling is a tricky business. And on April 20, 2010, as British Petroleum was closing up a well it had drilled...
...To stop oil from shooting up—creating the "gushers" beloved of old-time oilmen—drillers fill their wells with special heavy mud...
...Money was an issue—with Metro's budget tightly squeezed, many positions on the safety staff were vacant...
...Machines can be built for safety, but they only work properly when the operating instructions reflect the knowledge of the people who best understand the equipment and the environment in which it operates...
...Benjamin Ross is author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment [Oxford University Press, 2010...
...Rules must be laid down to prohibit manifestly unsafe practices, but that is only a start...
...And on April 20, 2010, as British Petroleum was closing up a well it had drilled beneath the Gulf of Mexico to explore for oil, the company's luck ran out...
...The mud must stay in place as high tech equipment maneuvers in and out of the hole, as steel tubing is installed to extract the oil, as the many potential leakage points are sealed up—with all of this done by remote control, using communications lines, power cables, and equipment jammed together in a mud-filled tube miles long and inches wide...
...To advocate for government supervision only begins the discussion, however...
...A train operator and eight passengers were killed when spurious electrical oscillations falsely signaled a clear track ahead, while a second train was sitting immobile around a bend...
...Federal regulation came only after a disastrous oil well blowout off Santa Barbara in 1969, and the rules were strengthened after the Exxon Valdez crashed on the Alaskan coast in 1989...
...In the case of the Washington Metro—a highly automated system that is another instance of complex engineering—safety similarly requires continual attention from the people who do the work...
...Mere "compliance" with rules written by a government agency will not stop oil spills...
...BP in 2010 was left free to misbehave by a dysfunctional oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, whose officials just two years earlier had been caught accepting drugs and sex from oil companies...
...Keeping a deep well under control requires constant watchfulness, along with a commitment not to take chances with safety...
...The result was catastrophic...
...Those on the front line must have the knowledge to recognize hazards and take preventive action, the authority to make decisions that cost money and lose time, and the will to remain perpetually vigilant...
...A survey of employees found that 42 percent had reported a hazard within the last year, but the reports rarely reached the people supposedly in charge of safety...
...Similarly, before the drama of the trapped Chilean miners that riveted the world last year, workers had repeatedly reported safety violations to unheeding superiors...
...But money was not the whole problem...
...Here we come to what is perhaps a deeper cause of the Gulf oil disaster...
...This idea was quickly shot down by company executives, and the principle was established that the companies would be restrained only when government steps in...
...Similar signal failures had led to several near-misses in previous years, but the problem was left to fester...
...But rules mean little without enforcement...
...A committee of technical specialists, appointed to fulfill this promise, proposed that the API send out inspectors with powers to enforce their recommendations...
...A world of outsourcing, downsizing, and union-busting is not a world where workers take on responsibility...
...The history of spill regulation—and resistance to it—stretches back to the Oil Pollution Act of 1924...
...After heavy lobbying by the American Petroleum Institute, oil companies were exempted from that law...
...To stave off further federal intervention, the industry agreed to establish a system of self-regulation...
...Elimination of the profit motive does not ensure a concern for safety, as innumerable examples attest...
...The real job of regulation is to alter incentive structures so that the necessary institutions and attitudes, referred to as "safety culture," are created within the organizations that do the work...
...The essence of a safety culture is the empowerment of the rank-and-file worker to identify hazards and prevent accidents...
...That commitment was lacking at BP...
...Investigations by the Federal Transit Administration and National Transportation Safety Board found that Metro, in many cases, responded to safety requirements by issuing pieces of paper without changing how the railroad was actually run...
...Even the oil industry's own experts have long recognized that their companies, left to their own devices, will put profit ahead of safety...
...Effective oversight of an activity as complex as deep drilling is no simple matter...
...Yet the entire direction of the American economy in recent decades has been to disempower workers...
...Government's role, in overseeing these complex systems, is not to tell people exactly what to do...
...Safety can only be ensured when the people who do the hands-on work and their direct supervisors accept individual responsibility for it...
...It's not news that corporations cannot be trusted to protect the environment by themselves...
...Although it's not wrong to blame BP's misdeeds on a corporate mentality that put profit above all else, the cure for the disease is more elusive than the diagnosis...
...It's up to human beings to pinpoint potential failures, fix them before accidents happen, and act quickly when the rules don't apply...
...Here the challenge lies not in dealing with an extreme environment, but in the extraordinarily high level of reliability required from equipment that must operate correctly, year after year, minute by minute, every time a train goes by...
...In the weeks before the disaster began, company managers repeatedly cut corners to save money, overlooking anomalous fluid movements that warned of what was to come...
...The main danger comes from exploratory wells, drilled through rocks whose properties are only dimly understood beforehand...
...At the depths where BP was searching, fluids are under enormous pressure, weighed down by the miles of water and rock above them...
...The seeming inability of our institutions to prevent avoidable accidents may be yet another manifestation of America's social regression...
...Plans must be adjusted on the fly, and quick response to unexpected hazards is essential...
...The June 2009 crash on Washington's government-owned Metro comes quickly to mind...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
