The Baker Panel Report - ABSA

effective process control, procedures, training of personnel, and human factors. The Texas City tragedy in March 2005 was a process safetyaccident.The Panel has focused on process safety rather than personal safety. The Panel believes that its charter and the CSB’s August 2005 urgentrecommendation require this focus.QUALIFICATIONS RELATING TO THE PANEL’S FINDINGSAt the outset, the Panel seeks to clarify what its findings do and do not represent. Because of the legal and regulatory context in which thePanel’s report is being delivered, the Panel believes that additional explicit cautionary guidance is appropriate relating generally to the Panel’sreport and specifically to the Panel’s findings.The Panel’s charter calls for assessments of effectiveness and recommendations for improvement, not for findings related to legal compliance.In making its findings and recommendations, the Panel’s objective was excellence in process safety performance, not legal compliance. As aresult, the Panel’s report and specifically the Panel’s findings are not intended for use in legal proceedings to which BP is or may become aparty. Rather, the Panel’s findings provide a basis for recommendations to BP for making improvements in BP’s corporate safety culture,process safety management systems, and corporate safety oversight. The Panel’s report focuses primarily on identified deficiencies that mightbe corrected through the implementation of its recommendations rather than BP’s positive attributes that the Panel observed during the courseof its review.Because the Panel’s findings are not designed or intended to assign blame or to apportion responsibility for any prior events, the Panel did notattempt generally to develop evidence that would be legally admissible or to draw conclusions about compliance with legal standards. Inmaking its findings, the Panel is neither making objective determinations nor acting in a role comparable to a finder of fact in a legalproceeding. For example, the Panel did not have subpoena power to compel the production of information or documents, and Panel interviewswere not taken under oath. Data from the process safety culture survey that the Panel conducted are subject to the limitation that such datareflect the opinions, beliefs, and impressions of the respondents, but are not legally admissible evidence of facts underlying those opinions,beliefs, and impressions. For these and other reasons, the information that the Panel considered sometimes reflects varying degrees ofambiguity and interpretation on the part of the Panel. In carrying out the responsibilities under its charter and in developing itsrecommendations, the Panel did not believe it necessary to try to eliminate all factual ambiguities encountered during its review.The Panel often based its findings and recommendations on general principles of industry best practices or other standards for reducingprocess risks. Observance of these standards should result in improved safety performance even though many of these standards do notnecessarily have legal effect. The Panel’s findings are based not only on the information developed during the course of the Panel’s review, butalso on the collective experience and expertise of the Panel members.Additional qualifications should also be noted. First, the Panel has not attempted to address possible legal defenses or objections that BPmight have if one or more parts of this report were to become the subject of a legal proceeding, including the separateness of and limitedliability attributes of various legal entities in the BP organizational structure. Second, the Panel notes that it has a limited basis for comparingBP to other companies with respect to the matters at issue in this assessment. Process safety incidents and performance data are not tracked,reported, or benchmarked in the same way as incidents and performance data relating to personal safety. Moreover, the types of data on whichthe Panel relied in making its findings—interviews of different levels of refinery personnel and corporate-level managers, a process safetyculture survey, process safety management technical reviews, and the review of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents—wereavailable to the Panel for only BP and not for any other company. While the Panel believes that the deficiencies in process safety performanceThe Panel’s Review C 14