[oh-4-fucks-sake]

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.

[squigg]

I was consulting at BP back in 2002 - even back then the health and safety environment inside their offices (I was all over the world with them) was the same as their oil rigs ... no trip hazards go unreported, always hold the handrails, always cover a hot drink, no calls in the car even with handsfree, very low speed-limits (with cameras) on-site etc - it's lived with me all my days and is very valuable safety advice TBH - none of it was theatre.

Also, every meeting would start with a safety announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same - drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is reduced

[throwaway0a5e]

Actually having an adult discussion about safety tradeoffs at scale in this day and age of "but if it even saves one life" isn't possible. You simply can't go on record having acknowledged that tradeoffs even exist. Wherever you draw the cost:benefit line, no matter how generous, someone will try and make you look like the bad guy for not setting it a little more conservatively.

And that's why they talked about charger cables and not the oil spewing elephant in the room.

[newsclues]

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.

[sp332]

> I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Then you'll remember that they were given an industry award for safety that year. Yes, after the disaster.

[andylynch]

I worked at a Shell site a few years earlier. The stats on accident in the office were surprisingly high. But the #1 cause of lost time was accidents on the 20 minute drive to the plant each day, especially at twilight.