“Bureaucracy and compliance now seem less about managing the safety of the workers we are responsible for, and more about managing the liability of the people they work for.” — Sidney Dekker One of the foundations of process safety is that we learn from experience. Because relevant experience comes from making mistakes and facing failures, [...]
“If I’d known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself.” — Billy Noonan The 1967 film, The Graduate, has one of the most famous lines in all of cinema. Mr. McGuire is giving advice to recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman. Mr. McGuire: “Just [...]
“Do you fix a wheel that isn’t broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses?” — Jodi Picoult During the week beginning Thursday, May 21, 2026, and going over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, our phones lit up with queries from friends and acquaintances about a series of chemical mishaps and disasters that got [...]
“Give me a 15-foot crocodile any day over a bee.” — Bindi Irwin We recently had an unexpected hazard appear outside our office. Unexpected by us, our neighbors, and the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department, at least. A hive of bees covered the fire hydrant outside our front door. From across the street, neighbors carefully [...]
“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” -Joseph Joubert On a busy afternoon, maintenance flagged a small leak on a piece of equipment, nothing urgent, but something that required a shutdown to fix properly. Operations pushed back. So, a temporary workaround was put in place, extra checks were [...]
“You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you.” — Jacob Bronowski A few months ago, I wrote about a project that Bluefield was undertaking to understand the carbon dioxide levels in and around alcohol fermenters. Particularly the fermenters in craft distilleries and microbreweries. I promised to keep everyone [...]
“It was not uncommon; it’s what they do. But there was something going on that was different.” — C.W.Sigman, Director of Kanawha County Emergency Management At about 9:30 am on Wednesday morning, April 22, 2026, two chemicals reacted to form hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas, at the small Catalyst Refiners facility in Institute, West Virginia. [...]
“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky This week at the 22nd Global Congress on Process Safety, my colleague Michael Smith presented a poster on “Getting Safer: The Future of Shipping Hazardous Materials”. His premise was that of all the modes [...]
“The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.” — Eugene McCarthy A client recently posed this question: “Why do you think the EPA is more willing to update its regulations than OSHA?” Is it? We gave a glib answer – resources – but [...]
“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” — Malcolm Gladwell Facilities in the chemical process industries were required to report accidental release events to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) beginning back in March 2020. These included incidents [...]
