The value of process safety culture for inspection in major hazard industies

Safety culture is increasingly recognised as the third important determinant of safety, complementary to technology and safety organisation. There are no legal requirements with respect to safety culture, except for nuclear power plants. Safety culture is and remains therefore a responsibility of the major hazards industry itself and it was recognised that safety cultures were relatively poorly developed. The purpose of this research was to assess safety culture in fourteen major hazard companies in four industrial sectors: refineries, (petro) chemical industry, bulk storage and chemical warehousing. This leads to safety culture scores, based on fourteen dimensions such as safety communication, contractor management and learning from incidents. (Petro) chemical companies and refineries had good or acceptable scores. If a score of 3 (a calculative safety culture) is regarded as the minimum acceptable score for a major hazard industry, several companies in bulk storage and chemical warehousing scored at or below the acceptable minimum. The process safety culture assessment also identified strengths and weaknesses regarding the fourteen dimensions of process safety culture, and these varied for the different industrial sectors. The outcomes enabled the inspectorate to focus on topics related to weak dimensions. Since the end of 2014 a new national project is being carried out to develop a simplified process safety culture assessment tool for inspectors. This modified method should reasonably correctly identify companies that have a ‘strong’ and a ‘weak’ safety culture. The aim is to nationally include safety culture in risk-based inspection strategies.