Dow Learnings & Actions from the Deepwater Horizon Accident

Dow Learnings & Actions from the Deepwater Horizon Accident

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, killed 11 workers, injured 16 others, and resulted in an offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.  As with all major incidents in industry, there are lessons to learn from systemic failures that resulted in the tragic loss of life, insult to the environment, and the equipment loss.  Many companies, including The Dow Chemical Company, followed the subsequent investigation closely to determine which lessons could be leveraged to strengthen internal programs. 

Risk identification and management systems in Dow’s Process and Occupational Safety programs are robust.   Dow management systems are intended to meet or exceed Industry Standards with respect to design, operation and layers of protection.  The prevention of large scale accidents like Deepwater Horizon depends on an acute awareness of worst case scenarios and an unfailing vigilance to ensure that essential protection layers are not compromised.  Dow management system reviews in 2011 on the same management systems involved in this incident identified opportunities for improvement and/or action plans in several areas. This paper will focus on three programs that resulted from those management system reviews.  The three programs are:

(1)    a targeted High-Consequence Emergency Response Drill program,

(2)    a High Potential Process Safety Near Miss Program, and

(3)    technology-specific Process Safety Cardinal Rules.

For each of the three programs, we will describe the content of the program and how it was implemented at the company level. Then we will describe with specific examples how these programs were implemented at a facility level.  We believe that each of these programs play a key role in preventing a catastrophic event and they have been a part of Dow’s continuing process safety performance improvement over the last several years.