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That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like,

That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off. Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.

taurath 4y ago
In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
ohyoutravel 4y ago
Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
- ChefboyOG 4y ago
  That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
  - seanp2k2 4y ago
    Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
    - azinman2 4y ago
      > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
      - squigg 4y ago
        And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
        throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
        brnaftr361 4y ago
        People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.
  - ikr678 4y ago
    It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least). One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.
- acs 4y ago
  I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories. Wild how memes like that must have spread through the industry. 10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.
  - oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
    I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill. I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space. I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like: 1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures. 2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it. 3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization. 4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand. 5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that. What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
    - newsclues 4y ago
      Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.
nebula8804 4y ago
Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.
jagger27 4y ago
> It’ll take a disaster to fix it. It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
- rapjr9 4y ago
  There have been some horrible incidents in the US: https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/remembering-the-graniteville-train-wreck-13-years-later/article_a7f78a0d-3e93-5301-928f-84a42f310830.html https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/rememberin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents
wiredfool 4y ago
When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care. In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations). Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be. My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability, and nothing more.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks. Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.
falsenapkin 4y ago
I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar. One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator. Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?
nostrademons 4y ago
My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago. The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety. My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.
doodlebugging 4y ago
The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur. They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc. It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination. Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes. He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate. Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions. When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work. I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.

taurath 4y ago

In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.

ohyoutravel 4y ago

Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.

ChefboyOG 4y ago
That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.
- rfrey 4y ago
  It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site. Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    > Oil and gas is safety obsessed. And yet…
    - squigg 4y ago
      And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.
      - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time. But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
        brnaftr361 4y ago
        People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.
- ikr678 4y ago
  It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least). One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.
acs 4y ago
I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories. Wild how memes like that must have spread through the industry. 10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 4y ago
  I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill. I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space. I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like: 1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures. 2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it. 3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization. 4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand. 5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that. What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.

nebula8804 4y ago

Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.

jagger27 4y ago

> It’ll take a disaster to fix it. It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

rapjr9 4y ago
There have been some horrible incidents in the US: https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/remembering-the-graniteville-train-wreck-13-years-later/article_a7f78a0d-3e93-5301-928f-84a42f310830.html https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/rememberin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents

wiredfool 4y ago

When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care. In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations). Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be. My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.

brnaftr361 4y ago
Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability, and nothing more.
curiousllama 4y ago
This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks. Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.

falsenapkin 4y ago

I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar. One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator. Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?

nostrademons 4y ago

My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago. The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety. My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.

doodlebugging 4y ago

The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur. They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc. It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination. Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes. He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate. Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions. When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work. I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.