Accidents versus Incidents

If you have ever read the Jules Verne classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, you might remember Captain Nemo drawing a distinction between accidents and incidents. The distinction is a matter of intention. When a ship inadvertently hits a rock and sinks, that is an accident. When Nemo’s submarine intentionally rams a ship to make it sink, that is an incident.

Like everyone else, I can scarcely believe what is unfolding along much of the Gulf Coast as oil spreads farther and wider from the broken remains of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Investigations are uncovering signs that BP knew its equipment was not operating properly and routinely took shortcuts on safety. Seeing that, Captain Nemo would say the BP disaster was an incident, not an accident.

If BP had fixed the blowout preventer when it realized the equipment wasn’t working correctly, the entire catastrophe unfolding off the Gulf Coast need not have occurred.

Accidents do happen. Many years ago, a single wrong character in 368,000 lines of software blew a hole in a high temperature chlorine reactor and evacuated a town in a place where my family spent its summers for generations. The company that owned the factory and the software had tested and tested, and had successfully used that software at about 60 factories for at least 20 years. It had tried diligently to make sure no such event would happen.

That’s an accident. It’s also an example of why I am so demanding about my work. I know the man whose mistake caused the chlorine release. He stayed up all night figuring out what went wrong, and I tested the fix.

There are companies (and people) who do their best to take care of their accidents, learn from the experience, and strive to do better. There are other companies that don’t. If I had an opportunity to work for BP or for ExxonMobile today, I would choose ExxonMobile. Look up the two companies’ safety records at OSHA and the reason will be obvious. Like Du Pont, whose company and affiliates I do a lot of work with, ExxonMobile has become a top level performer for safety in its field.

Perfection is an unrealistic demand. I want to work with companies and people that learn from their experiences and try to do better, and that’s part of what I offer in return.