The recent triple mortality in a Bechtel LNG construction project in Port Arthur, Texas, promoted the sincere comments of the signature president and Operational Director Craig Albert. “I can’t start expressing the crash and pain that we feel throughout Bechtel,” he added, adding that the company is “committed to understanding exactly what happened wrong and assured us that we do our best to prevent it from happening again, in Bechtel or anywhere.”
These words reflected on my part on how Enr and the construction industry generally knew what is wrong when there were accidents. To say, the information simply does not jump freely in the public domain, even after federal and state researchers have published information while imposing security sanctions on which they found that government standards violated.
In the six months that state and local labor researchers generally require completing their probes, reporting and criminalizing, they collect a lot of information on what happened beyond what is described in security violations. If you think accidents result from complex sets of human interactions, such as me, and not just simple mistakes or even a “root cause”, you know what I mean.
The full report of a OSHA compliance officer, when one is done, is still privileged until all legal affairs between the agency and the employer ends, a process that often lasts a year or more. Even when finished, OSHA staff may require many months to comply with the application for the Freedom of Information Law before releasing the notes and photographs of interviews with compliance officers.
In the meantime, some of the information, including long technical reports, can be produced by parts of various demands. They can be skewed and read in this light, but they are useful, although they often require to be excavated to find them in the legal databases. Another useful source, most journalists know, are reports issued by police and firefighters who are usually the first to the scene. But these often excellent reports also require a request process before they are published.
It is easier than ever to learn something quite soon on victims of local newspaper accidents and waffle campaigns, but the vital data on what their deaths or injuries caused are often included in private files for much longer.
