CSB Recommendations: Gems, Gewgaws, and Buried Treasure

The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) was authorized by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA) and began operation in 1998.  Under its CAAA charter, CSB’s mission is to “investigate or cause to investigate all chemical safety incidents.”  CSB typically selects incidents to investigate based on high potential learning, and to this end has completed ~84 investigations since 1999).  While this is far short of “all incidents,” the incidents investigated represent a rich source of lessons learned.   Surely, if every CSB recommendation was:

• potentially impactful and
• implementable, i.e. well-justified by the data, achievable, and directed to the right party who can make it happen, while
• no important recommendations were overlooked,

then process safety would be greatly advanced, regardless of CSB’s Investigate vs. Non Investigate” record.

This paper describes work to screen the 744 recommendations issued by the CSB as of this abstract submission.  The objective was to identify the particularly impactful recommendations, and consider whether potentially impactful recommendations might have been overlooked.  Finally, a project to perform a more detailed analysis is proposed.