(25a) The Impact of the BP Baker Report and Process Safety Survey

In March 2005, the BP Texas City refinery experienced an explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 employees. As a result of this catastrophic event, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) recommended that an independent panel assess BP North America's safety management, corporate safety oversights, and corporate safety culture specific to process (i.e., focusing on the safety of process activity, rather than on occupational safety behaviors of personnel). Thus, the BP U.S. Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel was formed. The Panel conducted an extensive review including interviews, refinery visits, survey administration, and relevant document review in an attempt to respond to the CSB's concerns and later released their findings in the BP Baker Panel Report (Baker, 2007). The current study was designed to gather information from industry insiders?safety personnel and chemical engineers?about the impact of the BP Baker Report on personal and process safety within their respective organizations and the industry as a whole. It was also designed to determine to what extent the BP Process Safety Culture Survey has become a benchmarking tool for assessing process safety culture.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the BP Baker report has awakened the industry to the importance of differentiating between personal and process safety (M. S. Mannan, personal communication, May 1, 2008; Hopkins, 2009). Among the major findings of the BP Baker Panel was the conclusion that while corporate leaders of BP North America had set a positive tone regarding personal safety, they had not done so with process safety. The BP Baker Panel concluded that BP North America attended to personal safety indicators (e.g., injuries, days missed from work) and erroneously inferred positive results for personal safety to indicate good process safety (Baker, 2007). In fact, the Panel found that BP's personal injury rates were not predictive of process safety performance. Indicators of personal safety are not indicators of process safety, thus they are not substitutable (CSB, 2007).

In the current study, we administered a survey to 379 subscribers of the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center listserv in February of 2009. The survey gathered information on the extent to which the BP Baker Panel Report has been read by and advocated by engineers in the field, the extent to which BP Baker Report has had an impact on or been useful within the industry, as well as whether instruments used in the BP Baker Report, such as the BP Process Safety Culture Survey, are also being used by others in the field. Descriptive results from the study will provide information that will be useful in determining to what extent the BP Process Safety Culture Survey may be a useful benchmarking tool from which to gage organizational process safety. It will also provide some insight into the mental models of chemical processing personnel regarding the transportability and generalizability of lessons learned in one organization to others.