The Baker Panel Report - ABSA

Worker fatigue and overtimeThe Panel believes that worker fatigue has a negative impact on process safety performance. Academic studies establish that workers are farless capable of performing their jobs safely and risks increase when workers are fatigued. Staffing at a refinery and the workload of the refineryworkforce can affect process safety performance. When not enough personnel are available to do the job, when personnel are trying to do toomuch, or when personnel are working too many hours, it is more difficult to ensure that the workforce will follow processes and procedures, willinspect and test equipment, and will maintain integrity management.The Mogford Report cites fatigue as one of the root causes of the Texas City accident:Some employees had worked up to 30 days of consecutive 12-hour shifts. The reward system (staff remuneration andunion contract) within the site encouraged this extended working period without consideration of fatigue. There were noclear limitations on the maximum allowable work periods without time off.It has not been possible for the Investigation Team to directly attribute actions or inactions of the operators andsupervisors to fatigue. However, this extended working period clearly has the potential to contribute to a lack ofattentiveness, and slowness to identify and respond to process upsets. 34While the Panel heard very little to attribute any process safety incident to excessive overtime or fatigue, the information available to the Panelleads the Panel to believe that many BP refinery personnel work excessive hours, thereby increasing process safety risks.Data that BP maintained show, in the Panel’s opinion, that hourly BP operations and maintenance personnel at all five U.S. refineriessometimes work significant overtime. The following table depicts the average percentage of overtime worked by operators and maintenancepersonnel in each of BP’s U.S. refineries as represented by the total number of overtime hours worked by operations and maintenance personneldivided by the total number of standard (non-overtime) hours worked by hourly workers:Table 11Percentage of Overtime by Operators and Maintenance PersonnelSite 2002 2003 2004 20051/1/06-6/30/06Site average(2002-6/30/06)Carson Operations 21 25 23 31 21 24Carson Maintenance 15 21 24 24 25 22Cherry Point Operations 14 14 20 19 20 17Cherry Point Maintenance 10 10 19 20 15 15Texas City Operations 24 31 28 23 28 27Texas City Maintenance 24 27 31 25 29 27Toledo Operations 18 23 18 22 18 20Toledo Maintenance 13 19 17 20 14 17Whiting Operations 24 29 28 28 31 28Whiting Maintenance 16 26 23 26 23 23Corporate Safety Culture C 87