When Petroleum Service Corp. (PSC) was established in 1952 as the nation’s first tankerman service, the company’s founder had a simple plan for growing the business: Work hard and take good care of your customers, and good things will happen.
That business plan has served the company well through its 65-year history. PSC remains the oldest and largest tankerman service in the country, and the company also provides a wide range of product handling and site logistics services at more than 100 refineries, chemical plants and terminal operations across the U.S. and Canada.
This past year was a big year for PSC. The company welcomed its 3,000th employee and achieved several noteworthy milestones for safety and environmental performance. And it all started with one man’s vision and a tankerman’s license …
Where it all began
After returning from service during World War II, Derryl H. Haymon began working at Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At that time, the petrochemical industry along the Gulf Coast was well on its way to becoming one of the nation’s largest economic sectors.
Haymon was working as a tankerman and dock supervisor at the refinery when he learned plant management had decided to turn over all of the facility’s barge loading to the towing companies. Realizing plant personnel had been doing the tankering work and now there was nobody to do it, Haymon hired his cousin and two other men to help him load and discharge barges for the towing companies. His wife, Helen, helped out in the fledgling business by taking orders and dispatching tankermen to where they were needed.
PSC remained a small operation until the late 1960s, when the refinery manager at Chevron in Pascagoula, Mississippi, hired the company to handle all of its tank car loading and rail switching. This was the beginning of the in-plant services PSC is so well known for today.
In the 1970s, PSC began working at a number of new chemical plants and refineries built along the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana, including Georgia Gulf in Plaquemine (now Westlake), CF Industries in Donaldsonville and Marathon in Garyville. The company still works at these sites today.
“PSC is unique in the industry in that we almost never lose a contract. Once we start working at a site, we stay there,” said PSC President Joel Dickerson. “Our longevity is rooted in our commitment to going the extra mile for our customers, executing at a high level of safety and quality, and taking care of our employees.”
In 1979, the company expanded its tankerman services to Houston under the leadership of Phil Johnson, who now serves as vice president of marine operations. The work in Texas continued to grow, expanding to the Corpus Christi and Port Arthur areas, despite some industry slowdowns that put other tankerman services out of business
“We survived mainly because of our operating performance. That’s always been a key factor in our success,” said Johnson. “We all take the responsibility of protecting our people and the environment very seriously.”
In 1996, PSC’s “Tankerman Operating Standards and Procedures” training program became the first tankerman certification course in the nation to be approved by the U.S. Coast Guard. This training program was the foundation for PSC’s Tankerman Career Academy (TCA), which was created in 2003 to meet the petrochemical industry’s need for certified tankermen. Since its founding, more than 220 new tankermen have graduated from the program. A number of those TCA graduates now serve in leadership roles within PSC.
Blazing new trails
The growth and expansion in the refining and chemical industries in North America over the past two decades created new opportunities for PSC to expand its geographical footprint beyond the Gulf Coast. The company now has plant and terminal operations along the East Coast and in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois and North Dakota. PSC also provides dock operations and loading services at several plants in Canada.
“We’re digesting an unprecedented amount of new work right now, with several major start-ups and expansions going on,” said Dickerson. “This has created some great advancement opportunities for many of our employees, and it’s been exciting for me to see the impact this has had on them and their families.”
With the growth has come increased pressure to continuously improve safety and environmental performance, something that Dickerson said is a major focus for the company. “Everything we do, from the people we hire to the training and management systems that support our employees, is designed to drive incident-free performance,” he said.
Raising the bar
Three years ago, PSC created a new safety leadership position: vice president of operational excellence. Adam Gilmore, an engineer from NASA, was hired to fill the role. Under Gilmore’s leadership, the company redesigned its incident investigation and root cause process, overhauled its training programs, and installed new software so that leaders across PSC could have immediate access to the latest procedures, policies and best practices.
Gilmore’s team also began producing a series of “Lessons Learned” videos featuring the company’s own employees who had been involved in incidents. “The intent is to appeal to people at a deeply personal level, so they have an emotional framework for our safety process,” explained Gilmore. “Employee reaction to these professional videos has been enthusiastic, and the investments we’ve made toward building a strong safety foundation are paying off.”
One clear indicator of a safety program’s effectiveness is the OSHA Total Recordable Incident Rate. “Our trend line over the past several years shows continuous improvement, even as the company has grown,” said Dickerson. “Last year, our Total Recordable Incident Rate across the company was .12, the best safety performance we’ve ever achieved in our 65-year history.”
This past year was also a record-setting year for the 200-plus tankermen working for PSC. They performed more than 32,000 barge transfers, handling an estimated 26.6 billion gallons of product, with zero recordable injuries and zero spills into the water as a result of tankermen error. This is the third time in six years the PSC tankermen have hit the zero spills target.
“To operate with no spills is a tremendous accomplishment given the volume and variety of products our tankermen transferred at hundreds of sites throughout our nation’s inland and intracoastal waterways system,” said Vice President Phil Johnson. “I’m very proud of how they have continued to raise the bar year after year for safety and environmental performance.”
One big family
Aside from safety, PSC’s leaders are also proud of the company’s family-focused culture that has been a constant through the years, even as the company has grown and expanded geographically. That’s one of the reasons why Joel Dickerson was excited to accept the company’s top leadership role last April.
“When I started working for PSC in 2001, I really connected with the men and women of PSC right from the start,” he said. “The company was full of special people who really cared about one another. I could tell the organization was going to do great things, and I wanted to be a part of that future.”
Dickerson got to see this caring family in action after Hurricane Harvey blew through last August, flooding his home and causing significant damage to the homes of more than 100 other PSC employees.
“I can’t begin to name the number of people who volunteered countless hours to muck out homes, cook food, deliver supplies, donate money, give up employee recognition dinners and generally do anything they could to help those of us in need,” he said. “As the long days turned into weeks, our PSC family continued to band together across the Texas Gulf Coast region and beyond, pulling each other up and helping us get back on our feet.”
Office locations
PSC has three offices in Texas: Corpus Christi, Port Arthur and Pasadena, where Dickerson and some of the Texas operations managers and support staff are based. The company’s main administrative, finance, human resources and dispatch operations are based out of three offices located in downtown Baton Rouge.
For more information, visit www. petroleumservice.com or call (281) 991-3500.