OKLAHOMA CITY—When an accident occurs on a job as the result of a safety breach, particularly in the oil and gas industry, the almost natural inclination is for the company is to terminate the person or people at fault and then hire a replacement.

But director of USDOT Peter Katchmar has an interesting perspective on this cycle that doesn’t always deal with the internal breakdown that made the safety breach possible, but hires someone new who is susceptible to the same mistakes. Katchmar calls it his pickle juice theory.

“You are going to go hire another cucumber, put him in your jar of pickle juice and create a new pickle,” Katchmar said to the amusement of those in attendance for the Safety Roundtable talk during the Midstream Technical Forum that was part of the kick off to Hart Energy’s DUG Midcontinent on Nov. 13. “That’s what you are going to do, you are going to throw this pickle out and you are going to go hire a new cucumber and throw him in that pickle jar. It’s your pickle juice and he is just going to turn into that same pickle that you just got rid of.”

While Katchmar’s analogy drew much laughter in the room, safety in the oil and gas industry—whether on offshore rigs or pipelines—is a serious concern for all companies.

Katchmar, who heads the PHMSA Accident Investigation Division at USDOT, says with the industry becoming younger and less experienced because much of the workforce is retiring that safety is becoming even more of a concern.

Less experienced workers are more prone to make safety mistakes that could end catastrophically.

Sean Atkin, EnLink Midstream; Peter Katchmar, USDOT; Mark Prewitt, DCP Midstream; and Aubrey Harper, 4AM Midstream; discuss worker safety at the Midstream Technical Forum at DUG Midcontinent in Oklahoma City. (Source: Markman/Hart Energy)

“I’ve seen people die because they say `Yeah, I’m qualified,’” Katchmar said. “The second question is do you use written procedures? This gentleman had been trained for a year and he was the job for six months, a big operator, and had never used written procedure ever and he was trained with a guy who had been in the business for 40 years.

“I don’t mean to put a damper or shadow over this whole thing but I like taking warm showers in the morning. I like being able to fill up my gas tank at the local gas stations. You guys do a wonderful job a lot the time—most of the time.”

The consensus among the four-member panel is that a lot is already being done but that even more is needed to ensure the safety of the industry’s most valued asset, it’s employees. What did seem varied in the discussion are the best practices to achieve the safest work environment.

Aubrey Harper, president and CEO of 4AM Midstream, said his company’s approach is to create an environment that goes beyond safety just in the workplace. For example, he said his company has talks with the employees about practical best safety practices like how to properly use a ladder at home and how to prevent from getting mugged at a shopping center during Christmas time.

“It creates that culture where you are thinking about safety beyond just where we are,” Harper said. “What can we do to keep our company, family safe? When you do that you create a culture where safety goes beyond the 8 to 5 or 7 to 6.

“It becomes a part of life for associates and our families. We feel like that’s important and we push for that.”

Senior director for safety and PSM for DCP Midstream Mark Prewitt said what his company decided to do a couple of years ago was make safety personal to the employees in order to elevate safety performance. Each year DCP Midstream brings all of its 400 plant and field supervisors together for three concurrent weeklong sessions on safety.

In one of the sessions, the company showed a video of an employee and his wife discussing a significant injury he suffered when a chain wheel operator fell off and struck him in the head. Fortunately, he was wearing a hard hat that prevented a much more serious injury.

“We had him do a video with his wife and had him talk through that day and then both of them kind of talked through the consequences of that and his recovery,” Prewitt said. “We did that with three other significant events that we had where we had the employee and their loved ones talk about what happened in the video.

“We showed that to our supervisors and had a two-hour discussion on that. And it really drove home the point that it is personal. An injury doesn’t just affect you, it affects your co-workers, your family. Really tried to drive that home.”

Another issue that oil and gas companies face is holding independent contractors to the same safety standards as their regular employees. In this industry, contractors are the backbone of the labor force and how well they follow safety guidelines when on even a short-term job can be critical to the entire operation. Sean Atkins, vice president for compliance at EnLink Midstream, said his company doesn’t look at contractors as just hired help but more as partners. EnLink holds safety summits with just its contract workers to make sure they are all on the same page.

The idea is to let the contractors know they are valued and to make sure they have the same level of understanding and training when it comes to safety as the regular employees.

“What it really boils down to is we don’t treat them as a third-party independent contractor that is just there for the job,” Atkins said. “They have challenges as well so we really want to help them succeed because when they succeed our projects succeed and then therefore the company succeeds.

“So we take a look at it with a more hands on approach.”

Prewitt said DCP Midstream takes a similar approach. But he also said it’s also important to make sure independent contractors without a long-term commitment are still on the same page when it comes to safety.

Prewitt, whose company will come in right around 6.5 million contract hours by the end of the year, said the major concern isn’t the contractors that work his company on the day-in and day-out basis but the ones who come in for a specific pipeline project and may not be well versed on DCP safety best practices.

“Those were the ones we found that their commitment to safety best practices kind of weren’t aligned with us,” Prewitt said. “So we made a big effort this year to scrutinize the contractors or the bidding process.

“We have selected several large contracts that were not the low bidder because we brought them with their executive team and talked to them about the safety culture and kind of their view of safety didn’t match up with ours so even though they were the low bidder we chose not to do business with them.”

Harper, who company isn’t quite as large as others on the panel, said 4AM Midstream has taken approach that the lowest-bidding contractor doesn’t necessarily always get awarded the job. 4AM Midstream is willing to pay a little more on the front end for contractors whose proven safety practices are in line with the company’s safety policy.

Harper says he has found that approach is more effective in the long run.

“It has always been those contractors who supply the cheapest bid that you are going to have the biggest amount of issues with,” Harper said. “You have to take the time to understand do they fit us? Are they going to be transparent enough with us?

“The approach with us is I will pay a little bit more to know that I have a contractor that thinks like me, thinks of safety like us, he thinks of our culture and he fits in. I’m not going to pay a huge price for that (as the audience laugh), but I’m going to look at that as a strong point.”

Terrance Harris can be reached at tharris@hartenergy.com

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