The Baker Panel Report - ABSA

THE PROCESS SAFETY CULTURE AT EACH OF BP’S FIVE U.S. REFINERIESThrough interviews of refinery personnel and management, interviews of corporate level management above the refinery level, the processsafety culture survey, and a review of BP documents, the Panel analyzed the safety culture within each refinery. In assessing the local safetyculture at each refinery, the Panel focused on a number of attributes, including the degree to which the workforce feels “empowered” as to process safety and “ownership” of process safety; the extent to which the workforce feels free to report safety-related incidents, near misses, and concerns without fear of retaliation; the process safety awareness, knowledge, and competency of the workforce; relationships and trust between different constituencies, including management and the workforce, management and contractors,and contractors and the workforce; whether deviations from policies and procedures are tolerated; the extent to which safety-related information flows freely among all levels of the refinery; whether the workforce has a shared belief that safety comes first, regardless of financial, scheduling, or cost objectives; and the extent to which the workforce is vigilant about process safety risks, continuously tries to reduce them, and seeks to learn fromincidents and near misses.> The wide variability in process safety culturesThe Panel struggled to detect any common safety culture among BP’s U.S. refineries. Because of legacy, historical, geographic, and other sitespecificinfluences, each of BP’s U.S. refineries appears to have a unique local safety culture, and significant differences exist among them.Other than corporate signage and the prevalence of the BP logo, little indicates that these refineries have common ownership. The processsafety culture survey of BP’s refinery workforce demonstrates this wide variability.Survey data demonstrate a consistent and wide divergence among, for example, the responses of Cherry Point employees and contractors, whotended to have the most positive perspectives of process safety culture, and those of Texas City and Toledo employees and contractors, whotended to have the most negative perspectives. Data from three representative survey items that yielded large percentage gaps in positiveresponses highlight this inter-refinery divergence.One survey item addressed whether respondents believed a culture existed at their refineries that encouraged raising process safety concerns.At Cherry Point, 95 percent of employees in the nine process safety functional groups, taken as a whole, agreed or tended to agree that such aculture existed, thereby revealing an overall positive opinion of this aspect of the refinery’s process safety culture. Responses were increasinglyless positive at the Whiting, Carson, Texas City, and Toledo refineries. In fact, the positive response rate at Toledo was 28 percentage pointslower than the positive response rate at Cherry Point. The following table, like the other tables below, highlights the wide range in responserates obtained from employees in the nine process safety functional groups at BP’s U.S. refineries.Corporate Safety Culture C 95