Health & safety: Laying down the law

Andrew Hopkins, the author of several bestselling books on process safety, argues in his latest release, "Failure to learn - lessons from Texas City", that the pendulum has swung too far away from prescriptive rules. Hopkins cites the 2005 explosion at Texas City, where 15 contractors died because the trailers they were working in were set up very close to the isomerization unit, which exploded after the raffinate splitter overfilled and hydrocarbons overwhelmed the blowdown stack, overflowed and ignited. There was a recommendation at Texas City that said that trailers should be sited at least 350 ft away from the process plant. Nevertheless, this was a recommendation and not a rule, and the risk assessment that should have been carried out was either done badly or not at all. However, not all agree with this view of the world. One such person is Peter Webb, health and safety manager for Basell Polyolefins in the UK. According to Webb, contrary to Hopkins' view that shoddy risk-assessment was to blame for BP's accident, the site already suffered from an over-proliferation of procedures and rules, which only confused staff. Web did not think the Texas City team used a risk assessment to justify what turned out to be a wrong decision, but they were confused because they already had too many rules. Hopkins points out that the problem here is not that there were too many rules, but that they were badly drafted.