(78a) Remember or Repeat

The title of my presentation is “Remember or Repeat” and it is intended to provide a brief historical perspective regarding a number of significant industry process safety events that have occurred over the past several decades, with an admonition (based on Trevor Kletz’s famous quote that “organizations have no memory, only people have memories”) that if we fail to remember these past events (and their key learnings), we may be setting ourselves up to repeat them. I’ve also incorporated brief references to three significant NASA events, the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, the Challenger Shuttle explosion in 1986, and the Columbia Shuttle incident in 2003, and plan to highlight the similarities in learnings (e.g., “normalization of deviance”) between those events and our own industry experiences. Finally, although I’ve never personally experienced an event of that magnitude, I have, in one way or another, been “once-removed” from several of them, and plan to highlight how those experiences shaped my views and reinforced my passion for process safety, including the critical importance of never losing a sense of one’s own vulnerability.