Analysis of Safety Culture Weaknesses in Chemical Safety Board Investigation Reports

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB), an independent, non-regulatory federal agency that investigates the root causes of major chemical incidents, has firstly analyzed safety culture as an important element to maintain process safety in the investigation report of “BP America Refinery Explosion” in 2007. On the same year, the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) published Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) in which process safety culture was newly added as an element. The author found six CSB reports which analyzed the weaknesses of safety culture and related them to the essential features of process safety culture in RBPS. Discussions are made on the results of the relations.