Page 15 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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The Improvement

Challenge

Our individual perspectives are shaped by past experiences. Two seri-
ous incidents involving fatalities and major property damage occurred
during the early years of my career. These tragedies left me with a clear
understanding of the need for more effective serious incident prevention
processes. I’ve also come to understand that much of the work necessary
to sustain incident-free operations is of low visibility—often performed in
the trenches of the organization. It is a paradox that this low-visibility
work has profound implications for the organization’s highest-priority per-
formance indicators, including profitability, customer satisfaction, safety,
environmental performance, and public image.
My career with Eastman Chemical Company began in 1969 with an
assignment as a process improvement engineer in Eastman’s Texas
Division polyethylene manufacturing facility in Longview. Eastman had
operated high-pressure polyethylene reactor lines since the mid-1950s.
However, as with many chemical plants of that era, the polyethylene plant
did not always run smoothly. Full understanding and control of the manu-
facturing process was still evolving at the time I joined the company.
Employees new to the polyethylene facility were often on the listening
end of stories repeated by plant operators. Many stories were of past inci-
dents that had potential to be major events, but through a phenomenon

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