safety

There is little doubt that the industry is committed to improving its safety performance—and most agree that improving the collective culture around safety is an effective approach to achieving this goal. But the specifics of how to achieve lasting change are more difficult.

SPE has formed a new technical section focusing on human factors engineering, which seeks to bring in knowledge from other industries, thereby ensuring safe operations and fostering a coordinated safety culture from top-level executives to workers on the ground.

Engineering culture is largely a safety culture. We have to assume that people will make a mistake and protect them from themselves through the way we design facilities.

This paper reviews the key areas for facility designers and engineers to include when designing facilities to ensure safe facilities. Use and incorporation of the principles outlined in this paper should enable engineers and designers to build safe facilities that reduce the risk of major incidents.

Recent accidents in the oil and gas industry have renewed interest in whether behavioral sciences can provide insights that can be translated into safety interventions.