All over America and across greater Houston, capital of the nation's petrochemical industry, hundreds of chemicals pose serious threats to public safety at facilities that may be unknown to most neighbors and are largely unpoliced by government at all levels, a yearlong Houston Chronicle (http://bit.ly/1VSg45P) investigation reveals.
Armed with a specialized thermal imaging camera, a group is traveling in the West Virginia Marcellus fields to document natural gas leaks and pollution.
After securing the necessary federal permits, a company that wants to build a 124-mile gas pipeline found itself blocked at the state level on Friday – Earth Day – when New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) denied water quality permits for the project.
Accurately measuring oil workers’ exposures to potentially toxic materials has long been problematic. Continuous sampling, in particular, was impossible because the equipment necessary for 24-hour sampling was too bulky to be delivered to remote sites in a timely manner.
Macondo disaster minimal compliance culture still exists
April 14, 2016
Offshore regulatory changes made thus far do not do enough to place the onus on industry to reduce risk, nor do they sufficiently empower the regulator to proactively oversee industry’s efforts to prevent another disaster like the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, an independent investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) warns.
Accurately measuring oil workers’ exposures to potentially toxic materials has long been problematic. Continuous sampling, in particular, was impossible because the equipment necessary for 24-hour sampling was too bulky to be delivered to remote sites in a timely manner.
Oilfield safety culture has come a long way since the ground breaking recommendations of the 1990 Cullin Report that followed the Piper Alpha disaster. But safety today is bogged down in a top-down dictatorial mentality which is not keeping up with how increasing systems automation and complexity is affecting the needs of our workers.
In 2013, IOGP published IOGP 452, Shaping safety culture through safety leadership. The aim was to raise awareness among senior figures in the oil and gas industry of the way their behaviors shape ‘safety culture.’
The recent flood of hundreds of new rigs, boats and barges came with an equally big flood of new rig managers, many of whom lacked the experience and self-confidence to fight the safety fascists- a weakness which is costing offshore contractors millions.
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