A clever trick from the inspector: if the two of you check a chemical factory for safety, one can isolate itself a bit. While the factory staff shows one inspector around, the other walks around on his own. And it pulls on pipes. Because the company sometimes tries to “keep the inspectorate away” from things that are not in order.
At least that’s how an inspector puts it to researchers at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam. The research report will be published this Wednesday Supervision, rule violation and enforcement in the run-up to accidents at Brzo companies, which contains this. The study was conducted under the supervision of criminologist Ellen Wiering with colleagues from the VU and Leiden University.
The study offers a unique insight into the supervision of safety at chemical plants. The researchers spoke to nine inspectors from the Social Affairs and Employment Inspectorate and two from environmental services about their work and what they experience at the approximately four hundred companies that fall under the Major Accident Risks Decree (Brzo). These are companies such as Tata Steel, Dow Chemical and refineries that work with hazardous substances. The SZW Inspectorate checks on safety, together with the environmental services and security regions.
The conclusions are striking, showing the complexity of supervising these companies. According to the researchers, many rules about working safely can be interpreted broadly. This makes it easy for an inspector to get bogged down in a discussion with the company he inspects.
The inspectors also call the companies so large and complex, and their own capacity so limited, that many violations simply go unnoticed. And that includes violations that later lead to incidents with injuries, such as explosions or the release of toxic substances. In recent years, the Netherlands has reported ten serious accidents to the European authorities.
Individual assessment
The inspectors do particularly complicated work, says researcher Wiering. That is why they focus on one specific place in the factory during inspections and examine it thoroughly. Because: “An inspector cannot possibly know all the details of a company.”
The next question is: do the installations – often networks of hundreds of kilometers of pipes, barrels, crackers and tanks – meet the ‘target regulations’? These are not detailed instructions on how it should be in the factory, but they are a ‘best efforts obligation’. For example, companies must take all possible measures to prevent soil contamination. And they have to make sure that safety procedures are up to date, inspect the most dangerous installations frequently, do everything they can to prevent leakage of a toxic substance.
In practice, this means a lot depends on the assessment of an individual inspector, the researchers conclude. Because when does the company break a rule? It was not only inspectors who sometimes had different views on this – that also applies to companies.
In the research, inspectors talk about – anonymous – companies that threaten lawyers or question the expertise of an inspector. Sometimes an inspection leads to a lengthy exchange of legal arguments. According to one of the inspectors interviewed, companies often have much more expertise in-house. And it also happens that they have such complex installations that it is all difficult for inspectors to understand. Wiering: “As an inspector in some cases you have to be firm and self-assured.”
Human mistakes
Together with some inspectors, the researchers looked back at incidents that took place at factories. During previous visits, the regulators admitted, they had not observed the subsequent causes of the accident. This is partly because accidents cannot always be prevented: sometimes they are due to human error, or those involved simply do not follow the procedures. For example, a fatal incident occurred at Chemelot in Geleen in 2016 because valves were opened in the wrong order.
In some incidents, the cause could have been discovered in advance. But that would not have happened, inspectors said, because an inspection often only covers a very small part of a company. You stick a thermometer in part of the company, as one interviewee says: your capacity is limited and some factories are huge. Inspectors also often check working methods on paper – in which case it is difficult to determine whether that working method is really safe or not.
Inspections are often announced. Companies can then prepare. This has advantages from the point of view of efficiency. But if you want to catch them making mistakes, that becomes more difficult. It is therefore preferable to visit unannounced, says one inspector, or draw up your own plan as much as possible on site. And some inspections take place at night. Sometimes there are only two people. They have to keep an eye on the entire factory, but often know many procedures less well, according to a respondent in the study.
Is proper supervision possible?
All in all, the research raises the question: to what extent can you actually monitor these dangerous installations properly? According to the research, incidents will continue to occur, even if society and politics will never accept this.
It is especially important, say the researchers, that the capacity of the inspection services is large. This has been a problem at the SZW Inspectorate for some time, which means that in recent years it has not always been able to carry out all the inspections it wanted to carry out. The service employs several dozen people to supervise large chemical companies.
The expertise of inspectors must also be at a high level, as well as their self-confidence. “It is impossible to seal everything up with rules,” says researcher Wiering. The companies involved are often too large and complex for that. Ultimately, she says, much of the responsibility rests with the companies themselves.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 20, 2021
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