Are biases towards the recent past causing us to unintentionally expose personnel to increased levels of risk?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the consideration of an unbiased approach to assessing risk to push the industry towards proactively addressing risk rather than reactively allowing cognitive biases to drive process safety culture and personnel risk management solutions. Scientifically proven to affect the way we process and interpret the world around us, cognitive biases allow us to shortcut the complexities of the world when making decisions. In some cases, biases can be surprisingly accurate, while in other instances they can lead to making poor judgements and decisions based on the limited information available to us. Specifically damaging in the process safety industry are the availability heuristic and the confirmation bias, which together cause us to focus on information that comes to mind quickly, justifies our opinions, and favors our existing beliefs. With recent industrial accidents that have resulted in fatalities and a push toward regulatory change in response to explosion events, we have seen a rise in the availability of blast resistant structures such as BRMs and hardened stick-built buildings to protect onsite personnel from explosions. The availability of such blast hardened structures has produced an unfortunate trend of moving personnel back in closer to processing areas. Recent advancements in full-scale testing and computer modeling capabilities suggests that even though such buildings may protect for some level of blast hazards, this approach may result in increased levels of personnel risk from other hazard types, specifically impinged jet fires and toxic exposure. This raises the question: are employees being placed in risky locations in a BRM or hardened building with a false sense of security?