Prepare, act, survive – taking the
lead
Opening with a shot of a much devasted fuel depot where flooding
had led to the ignition of a spilt fuel source resulting in hundreds of
fatalities is somewhat of a shock. As Andrew Nixon senior advisor at the
Environment Agency remarked, UK plc may be more resilient to flooding
with this incident not in the UK or Ireland but its impact still shocks.
Following the OECD’s All Hazards Approach to Emergency
Preparedness and Response published by the OECD in January 2018,
COMAH has also published an operational delivery guide – COMAH
Competent Authorities Operational Delivery Guide Inspection of COMAH
Operator Flood Preparedness – with the importance of leadership in
preparation and response stressed. The audience was advised to
remember that ‘preparation for flooding is best done on a dry day!’
www.oecd-nea.org/rp/pubs/2018/7308-all-hazards-epr.pdf
Enjoying their first stand at the 2018 Tank Storage Association’s
annual exhibition and conference were Allied Storage Tanks’ managing
director, Phil Doughty and Teresa Cornaby, accounts director
Drifting into failure – the impact of
human factors
A regular TSA exhibitor, IFC Inflow’s Kiran Shaw and Greg
Clarke welcomed many visitors to their stand
Accidents happen because the
controls we put in place fail
Having previously worked for Shell, Network Rail and Centrica, Tony-
Gower Jones is now a senior director at the Tripod Foundation,
specialising in the successful delivery of behavourial change at executive,
management and work force levels.
“We should be proud of our injuries record – the problem is that we
use this as a measure,” said Tony.
“Studying conversations about safety in leadership meetings, the
talk is mainly about the event rather than the cause. It’s important
to ask what conversation do we want to create with our workforce?
Celebrate the fact that injury/event rates are no longer an effective
measure of performance and measure the positives.
“For a quick and simple exercise to measure positives – ask the
workforce to hold the handrail when going up or downstairs and hand
out sweets to all those who hold the rail.”
Use our understanding of accident causation to generate new
measures to create positive conversations. Tripod is the ‘good intentions’
model of incident causation, this scientifically-backed model has helped
revolutionise how we think about incidents. For details of the Tripod
incident causation model – publishing.energyinst.org/tripod/home
Offering thought provoking facts on the impact of human factors on
performance were Ian Travers, director of ITL and W. Ian Hamilton from
ERM’s human factors team. Ideal for the final slots in a conference;
some audience participation was invited
According to data based on recent studies reported by UK HSE and
Shell, 43% of incidents are down to the poor design of HFE (human
factors and ergonomics), failures in procedures (21%), weakenesses in
competence (20%) and errors in communications (11%).
An organisation’s weakest link is often its failure to – discover,
understand, evaluate, decide, validate and evaluate risk – and
importantly to be clear about exactly what is to be achieved and then
share this vision with all staff.
Several cognative biases in our decision-making process can
normalise risk, including:
• A tendency to rely on the first piece of information provided
• An assumption that things follow predictable patterns
• Prior successful performance increases risk taking
• The ‘pain’ of loss is twice as great as the reward from a gain; so a
certain loss of convenience is valued over a possible increase in risk
• Over-emphasis of information that supports what we think
• Diminishing the importance of information that contradicts what
we believe
• Sticking with a flawed plan
When decision-making is made under stress, the typical failure
probabilities of a human’s performance are 1 in 2.
IEC 61511 – Functional safety – Safety instrumented systems
for the process industry sector Reliability, Maintainability and Risk –
Practical methods for engineers, David J Smith, 2001
Fuel Oil News | November 2018 21