“Prepare and prevent, don’t repair and repent.” – Author Unknown Most safeguards can be easily observed. They might be the mechanical guards that prevent one’s fingers getting ripped off by moving parts, the fences that keep unauthorized people out of a hazardous area, or the alarms that blare through the plant when the reactor reaches [...]
“Minimizing your exposure to pathology goes a long, long way.” — Dr. Susan Biali Haas When a sensor faults, it doesn’t stop providing information. It’s just unreliable information. It may be correct, it may not, but it is not to be believed. Like a clock that has stopped but is still correct twice a day, [...]
“I was looking for a way to do meaningful work and seeing how much satisfaction my father derived from his job made me see it was a profession I should be considering.” — Elizabeth Auld With stay-at-home orders still in place in many jurisdictions, and good sense dictating them even as the orders are lifted, [...]
“Shallow men believe in luck; wise and strong men in the cause and effect." – Ralph Waldo Emerson In process safety, one important aspect of assessing risk is determining what safeguards are in place to protect against a hazard. Often, we see teams credit human response as a safeguard, sometimes relying on the response as [...]
“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson COVID-19, with its 14-day – fortnight – incubation period has had the effect of concentrating some of the best minds in the world. I have read several articles recently where the authors suggest how the [...]
“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?” — Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn We love to hate regulations. The harder it is to comply with them, the more we hate them. [...]
“Life is a journey and not a destination.” — Lynn H. Hough When Richard Nixon signed OSHA into law in 1970, the United States was looking at 14,000 work-related fatalities per year. With a workforce of about 70 million full-time equivalents, the work-related fatality rate was about 20 fatalities per 200,000,000 hours worked. In 2018, [...]
“You’re a hero one day, you’re a villain another day.” — Vincent Tan Every good story is a story of conflict. It has a villain. It has a victim. And in the best stories, it has a hero. The story of a process incident or scenario is no different. It has villains—causes. It has victims—receptors, [...]
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride I find the phrase “While we never anticipate a loss of cabin pressure…” incredibly annoying. To anticipate means to think of something that will or might happen in the [...]
“Fear is often our immediate response to uncertainty.” — Gabrielle Bernstein In 2001, when the CCPS book, Layer of Protection Analysis: Simplified Process Risk Assessment, “the purple book”, stated that human response is “a relatively weak protection layer” and “less reliable than engineering controls”, many people were willing to accept that piece of conventional wisdom. [...]
