Manny Ehrlich, left, U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) member, and John Dony, director of Campbell Institute at the National Safety Council.
According to John Dony, director of the Campbell Institute at the National Safety Council, it is essential to consider the "contractor lifecycle" when assessing best practices in contractor management.
"We all want to have a contractor lifecycle, and that's really what we derive as the top-level insight," Dony said.
Research conducted in 2014-2015 by the Campbell Institute indicates a contractor lifecycle consists of five phases: prequalification, pre-job task and risk assessment, training and orientation, monitoring of the job and post-job evaluation.
"That's been where the core challenges are," Dony said in a presentation titled "Best Practices for Keeping Contractors Safe" at the International Liquid Terminals Association (ILTA) International Operating Conference & Trade Show held recently in Houston. "The best organizations are probably really good at the first three, decent at the fourth and not very good at the fifth."
"We know there are a lot of challenges out there that are underneath the surface," Dony said.
Dony listed other common challenges to contractor management, including a lack of specific courses of action for contractor infractions, no integration of contractors into an organization's safety statistics, no formal evaluation of contractors and lack of subcontractor safety.
Finding the root cause
Co-presenter Manny Ehrlich, a member of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), explained his organization's mission is to drive chemical safety change through independent investigations to protect people and the environment. That protection, Ehrlich said, extends to all personnel, whether in operations, management, maintenance or contract personnel.
"I have gone through all of the investigations that our agency has done in roughly 20 years where there have been fatalities," Ehrlich said. "I've found that if people did what they were supposed to do and admitted they didn't know what they didn't know, there would never have been any fatalities. So we try to look at all of our investigations and say, 'What have we learned? What can make this better the next time around?'"
The objective that must be understood when investigations are conducted, Ehrlich said, is to determine the root cause of what actually triggered the incidents, accidents and fatalities.
"If you can't figure out what the root cause was, you're not going to be able to help prevent future events," he said.
Ehrlich discussed an incident that occurred recently in Kansas, in which a cargo tank driver off-roaded a cargo tank of sulfuric acid into a storage tank of bleach.
"They sent 11,000 people into shelter and it generated all kinds of chlorine. Somebody there said, 'Oh, we know what the root cause was. The root cause was it generated a lot of chlorine," Ehrlich said.
"No, that wasn't the root cause," he countered. "The root cause was somebody screwed up, and we've got to find out why."
In order to improve safety culture, Ehrlich recommended companies commit to establishing safety as a core value, providing strong leadership, establishing and enforcing high standards of performance, formalizing the safety culture emphasis and approach, maintaining a sense of vulnerability, empowering individuals to successfully fulfill their safety responsibilities, deferring to expertise, ensuring open and effective communications, establishing a questioning and learning environment, fostering mutual trust, providing timely response to safety issues and concerns, and providing continuous monitoring of performance.
"The fact is people do things and they don't think about the adverse circumstances," Ehrlich concluded. "They don't know what they don't know. That's why we have unacceptable fatalities."
