Book: The Process Safety Professional. Chapter 1/7. Culture and The Future

Credit: Ian Sutton

Many of our recent posts have been taken from the manuscript of the book The Process Safety Professional. The goal of the book is to describe some of the skills, knowledge and experience that are needed for a process safety professional to be effective in his or her work.

This book is not intended to be a process safety primer. There are many other books, such as our own Process Risk and Reliability Management, and the many publications from the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), that fill that role.

We are now releasing the contents of the chapters as they are finished to our paid subscribers. This post is the seventh in the series. It is taken from part of Chapter 1 — The Process Safety Professional.

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Figure 1.1 provides a timeline that identifies some of the major steps in the development of the process safety management.

STEP 11. CULTURE

Recent years have seen considerable discussion to do with the topic of ‘culture’ within the context of process safety. For example, the Baker Commission report to do with the 2005 accident at Texas City (Baker 2007) uses the word culture many times; the following is a representative quotation from that report,

BP has not instilled a common, unifying process safety culture among its U.S. refineries. Each refinery has its own separate and distinct process safety culture.

The report does not define the word culture.