Reynolds Wrap Up: Don't Lose Sight of the Potential for the Big One!

What do I mean by that title?  Sometimes with our busyness with the “Daily Grind,” we can forget about our most important mission – prevention of a big event caused by an unanticipated fixed equipment mechanical integrity (FEMI) failure.  Those big events are the ones that get a lot of media attention, cost many tens of millions of dollars, cause big losses of production & capacity, and worst of all, may result in fatalities.  They are the ones on our risk matrix that are very high consequence but relatively low likelihood.  They are the ones that are not about leak metrics and typically only happen to a company once every 20+ years.  They are the ones that involve such large ruptures where 30,000 pounds of highly hazardous fluids may be released in a matter of seconds. 

Surely, we must continue to make progress on all 101 Essential Elements of FEMI, but not at the expense of losing sight of preventing the big one.  The really big events could even threaten our “License to Operate”, or in other words, could cause so much media and jurisdictional attention that most of the entire operating site is shut down for long periods of time while government investigations and lawsuits proceed.  They don’t happen very often, thank goodness, but that infrequency can lull us into complacency with regard to these big events.