Process Accidents: The Culture of Safety and the Human Element!

Eng. (Dr.) Deshai Botheju

st
[Ph.D. (NTNU), M.Sc.Tech. (USN, Norway), M.Sc. & B.Sc.Eng.(1 Hons) (UoM, SL), AIChE, AMIE(SL)]
(Currently consulting for the Norwegian petroleum industry, within Safety & Sustainability design and
management)

Abstract:

Vast improvements have been made during the last several decades in the fields of process and industrial
safety. This was mainly due to the adaptation of robust safety engineering and management philosophies
developed over time, which were often inspired by the case examples related to past industrial accidents and
other disasters. The widespread use of instrumented safety systems based on modern automation technologies,
and the developments made in reliability /integrity engineering also contributed to these advances in process
and industrial safety.

While the physical safety barriers are becoming ever more robust and reliable, the organizational and human
related aspects have now become a central point of interest. This is relatively a new development, with clear
contrast from the previously adopted standpoint giving key attention to the technological safety barriers. This
new paradigm of human-centered and organizational culture based safety management stems partly from
recent major accidents happened in process industries (as well as in other technologically complex industries)
where eventual causatives are connected to human and organization related aspects. It is commonly
understood that organizations with positive safety cultures may be able to avert accidents or near-misses even
when some of the technological safety barriers are not performing as expected, by deploying redundant
resources (human and technological), high level of alert, and being able to respond quickly to the developing
incidents. On the other hand, organizations with negative safety cultures might readily succumb to accidents
even when they do have highly sophisticated technological safety systems in place. This is due to the deprived
attention, negligence, and less awareness of safety, eventually leading to poor decision making and
management failures, before, during, and after an incident/accident scenario. The negative safety cultures are
often associated with multiple safety issues, lack of moral, deprived communication, vague responsibilities,
high vulnerability to major accidents, reputation damages and public outroar, lengthy legal battles, blame and
punishment based safety enforcement, and such other detrimental elements.

This lecture will further elaborate on the “safety culture” concept and will detail some of the surrounding
aspects governing the nature of a particular safety culture existing in an organization. Attention will also be
drawn to the recent industrial accidents and other disasters happened in Sri Lanka and the necessity of
developing culture and human based safety management strategies to avert or minimize such tragedies in
future.

******
Presenter:
Eng. (Dr.) Deshai Botheju is currently consulting for the Norwegian petroleum industry, within his field of
expertise of Safety & Sustainability engineering. He obtained his post-doctoral, doctoral and master’s degree
qualifications in Norway, after graduating from University of Moratuwa as a Chemical & Process Engineer in
2003. He has since been involved in numerous large scale industrial projects as well as in various research and
development projects, while producing many publications in the area of industrial and environmental safety.
The key areas of his research interests include: Process safety & Major accidents prevention, Industrial risk &
safety management, and Safety culture.