Vanessa Sutherland - Trevor Kletz Memorial Lecture

10 Jul 2018 at 12:47 // under Chemical Engineering Safety

Vanessa Sutherland was¹ the Chair of the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) and delivered the fourth Trevor Kletz Memorial Lecture² at the IChemE hazards conference.

I did not attend the lecture in person however the IChemE have put a video of the presentation online³.

[

]lecture

The key points that I took from the presentation were:

The CSB is Independent

• Its only job is to investigate and help avoid future occurrences
• It does not regulate - therefore it is able to criticize both operators and regulatory agencies.
• It may not last - The US government has attempted to remove its funding for two years in a row though congress has reinstated it so far.

Things change

• One of the problems with regulations is they can be very restrictive and can't adapt to newer knowledge or technologies quick enough.
• Companies are also at risk of not reviewing things that they have done for a while without any accidents yet.
• As engineers it is imperative we keep a focus on continually educating both ourselves and others within our organisations.

Be careful of mergers

• When companies merge, it is critical to ensure that best practices of both companies are shared and the best of the best is implemented.
• The whole industry could do better in the same way that the airline industry does in terms of sharing knowledge of accidents.

As a result of this I have now added the RSS feed for both the CSB and the HSE⁴ to my feed reader so I will be kept up to date with future updates from both organisations.

Finally I would like to finish with the Trevor Kletz quote that was repeated several times with good reason:

If you think process safety is expensive, try an accident.

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1. I found out afterwards that she unexpectedly resigned shortly after giving this presentation ↩
2. The lecture starts at about 26 minutes into the video. ↩
3. They have put several other keynote presentations online as well and I hope to watch some of them over the next few weeks when I get time. ↩
4. The RSS feed on the HSE website is wrong, the correct feed is http://press.hse.gov.uk/feed/ ↩

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