“That’s why kings send ambassadors. This way, if someone gets captured, the king is still safe. We, my friend, are something Elend can never be: expendable.” — Brandon Sanderson When OSHA was first developing the Process Safety Management (PSM) standard (29 CFR 1910.119), there was a growing practice in the chemical process industries of contracting [...]
“I have to buy three of everything. It doesn’t make any sense, but I have to. I’m worried I might lose it, and if I lose it, then I have a backup and then I have a backup to my backup.” — Huda Kattan I was travelling this week and while at the airport, I [...]
“I found that the recipes in most – in all – the books I had were really not adequate. They didn’t tell you enough…I won’t do anything unless I’m told why I’m doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of these recipes, it should turn out [...]
“This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.” — Walt Whitman I once worked at a plant that produced performance chemicals. Performance chemicals are sold based on what they do rather than what they are. The key specifications are the performance specifications, not the composition specifications. [...]
“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin All change should be managed; in any endeavor, under any circumstances. When people ask about management of change, however, they are usually talking about the specific regulatory requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and its Process Safety Management [...]
“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, [...]
“Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide – undetectable yet deadly.” — Cherie Carter-Scott World Fertilizer published an article in its March 2026 issue on “An Overlooked Process Hazard” in the production of ammonia fertilizers. It seems to me that this hazard has broader implications, beyond fertilizer production. Flammable liquids and flammable gases are all covered by [...]
“Everything that comes together falls apart.” — John Green When we think of decomposition, we usually think of it as a slow, inexorable process of breaking down useful things into malodorous glop. Think of that six-month-old head of lettuce in the bottom of the refrigerator. Or the carcass of the dead animal in the woods, [...]
“Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.” — Dani Shapiro People love lists. Top Ten Lists. Top Twelve Lists. Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty. And for those with short attention spans, Top Three Lists. I recently received an email asking if I agreed [...]
“It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. OSHA requires incident reports. For recordable injuries or illnesses, OSHA requires that a 301 Form, Injury and Illness Incident Report, be completed, per 29 CFR 1904.29(a). For workplaces with PSM-covered [...]
