Transocean and BP, trade associations, and U.S. regulators largely judged the safety of offshore facilities by focusing on routine personal injury and fatality data such as dropped objects and trips and falls when they should have been more focused on managing the potential for catastrophic accidents, a federal report on the Gulf oil disaster says.

Investigators with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) who examined the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf said that timely checks on safety critical equipment and response to well control events would provide a better assessment of the health of safety management systems.

These type of indicators may be precursors to the kind of tragedy that took 11n lives on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig following the Macondo well blowout on April 20, 2010, the CSB said in a report released in Houston today that tracks with previous recommendations of the board.

A number of past CSB investigations have found companies focusing on personal injury rates while virtually overlooking looming process safety issues like the effectiveness of barriers against hazardous releases, automatic shutoff system failures, activation of pressure relief devices, and loss of containment of liquids and gases, said CSB Chairperson Dr. Rafael Moure-Eraso. Furthermore, we have found failures by companies to implement their own recommendations from previous accidents involving, for example, leaks of flammable materials.

In its investigation of the Macondo disaster, the CSB found that BP and its contracted drilling rig operator, Transocean, were focused on personal safety issues such as worker injury rates, rather than broader safety issues involving the process of drilling for oil using a complex rig.

Citing what the report says was a lack of sustained focus on process safety, CSB investigator Cheryl MacKenzie described an eerie resemblance between the 2005 explosion at the BP Texas City refinery of March 2005 and the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

At the BP Texas City refinery on March 23, 2005, contract workers had just returned to temporary trailers at the plant after attending a celebratory lunch commending an excellent personal injury accident record. Shortly after lunch, an explosion occurred during process startup, killing 15 and injuring 180 others. At Macondo, BP and Transocean officials were in the process of lauding operators and workers for a low rate of personal injuries on the very day of that tragedy. Company VIPs had flown to the rig in part to commend the workforce for zero lost-time incidents.

The emphasis on personal injury and lost work-time data obscures the bigger picture: that companies need to develop indicators that give them realistic information about their potential for catastrophic accidents. How safety is measured and managed is at the very core of accident prevention, MacKenzie said. If companies are not measuring safety performance effectively and using those data to continuously improve, they will likely be left in the dark about their safety risks.

A BP spokesman told the Associated Press that the company stepped up and developed more rigorous safety indicators following the accident.

The safety board said when BP looked at offshore endeavors it focused on financial risks, not process safety risks. And after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the companys own accident investigation report recommended requiring hazard reviews of BP-owned and contracted rigs, the safety board said.

Link:
Oil Firms, Regulators Miss Major Accident Indicators: Gulf Spill Report