Maintenance Manager Q&A: Taking Plant Safety from Weekly Fires to Goal Zero

We spoke with Bruce Grissom, a former Maintenance Manager with over 40 years of experience. He shared how he helped to build a safety culture and how safety has evolved in the heavy asset industry. The plant referenced in his comments had roughly a thousand employees, including contractors each day, not including Turnarounds. 

Q: What was your safety experience like in the early years of your career? 

BRUCE: In the early 1980s, we were having major events, even fires, every week at the refinery where I worked. It was so bad the mantra on our shift (I was an operator at the time) was “Let’s just get through our eight hours without an incident and go home.”  

Q: What changed in your safety journey?  

BRUCE: A lot of people died in my facility over the 37 years I worked at my first refinery. Unfortunately, some were close friends. Then we had a single event—a major explosion—in one of our sister sites where we lost 13 people.   

Following the event,our company got serious about safety. We picked up the slogan “Goal Zero.” I don’t know if it was our own or a spinoff of someone else’s. But it stuck and we created a culture that did not accept or tolerate injuries. We went from a major event and/or fire every week and people dying to zero injuries.  

At first, many thought it was a bridge too far. Even I couldn’t see how we could get to zero injuries, accidents just happened. But we achieved Goal Zero over several years and adopted new safe work practices. I became one of the biggest champions. By the time I reached the senior level in my career, I was 100% convinced you can work in a zero-incident environment. It took a paradigm shift in how I looked at everything using safety as the first thought in every task.

Q: How did you get buy-in to work toward Goal Zero? 

BRUCE: The first thing we did was to remove taking any disciplinary action from all safety-related events.   

We treated every event as an opportunity to learn and built a mitigation plan for all similar future activities.We shared with the entire plant the event details, the extent of any injuries, and our mitigation plans.  

Specific to our contractors, we created a Contractor Safety Council. Once a week, all the safety leaders from each vendor would share every safety event that happened to one of their employees—from a mashed finger to a fall. We’d share it all to learn from it.  

When the injured employee was willing to share with the group directly, we encouraged it. 

Once we had shared collaboration between vendors to self-report, we went from reporting injuries to that zero-injury state. We used to measure in “Million Safe Hours." I remember reaching a million safe hours, and the entire site celebrated, it was a huge milestone.  

After Goal Zero, we measured in years as it related to injuries.  

Then, we began to measure near misses. That was what we wanted to talk about. I remember having a safety stand-down when someone fell off the back of a truck while offloading equipment. We shut all work down to learn and share what had happened. Even though that employee didn’t get hurt. That 4-to-5-foot drop could have killed that individual.  

That’s how we got there.   

Q: How did contractors on-site evolve their safety culture? 

In an environment where every vendor is in competition for work at my site, we had to create a safety culture where all our 30-plus vendors would share everything, even someone falling off a truck without injury.

At my site, we created a safety culture where everyone shared any incidents. We also shared safety practices across companies and shared learning opportunities. 

Q: How critical was support from the top to create a safety culture? 

BRUCE: If you don’t have support, you may improve safety statistics, but the culture will never be there. People will continue to take risks, things like crawling out on a pipe to perform a task instead of setting up a scaffold.  

Maybe they got lucky a thousand times. Goal Zero is we don’t want you to take that one thousand and one risk of falling out of the pipe rack. Just because you’ve gotten away with it for years, doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it again. 

Q: What are some typical risks you’ve seen workers take? 

BRUCE: There is a lot of bolted pipe connection work in heavy industry. When you’re working on these pipes with a wrench, the tendency is you want to pull toward you with all your strength.  

If you want to be 100% safe, you will push away from the body, even though you don’t have as much leverage. My front teeth are capped because I busted a tooth doing just that. 

Our safety culture would not accept a chipped tooth or someone falling over backward when the bolt breaks loose. You’re eliminating that one-in-a-million event.  

You’ve got to make it personal to move it from “I don’t want injuries at my site so I don’t want YOU to get hurt.”  

Another example: The guy crawling out onto the pipe rack. We had to teach employees to be patient and wait long enough to get a scaffold built or a piece of lift equipment to help them safely gain access.  

Employees were no longer in trouble for waiting. In fact, we investigated why we failed to provide access prior to assigning the task. 

When it came to operator tasks, we even trained all operators on the use of Scissor and Man Lifts and then parked them just outside of the units so they could use them as needed.   

Q: What was your biggest worry or safety concern on the job? 

BRUCE: The biggest challenge was new employees to the site. We would try to identify new employees, with things like different color hard hats or markings on their hard hats.   

There are two types of newness: Brand new to the site but in the business for several years but they needed to learn your safety culture. The highest-risk employee is brand new to the industry and has never been to a plant site. Both types of people you want to identify for those employees working around them. 

The culture became when you see someone identified as new, you make sure they’re doing things right so that person doesn’t hurt themselves or hurt you. For example: make sure they’re not standing on a pump base to reach something or make sure their ladder is tied off, so it becomes second nature to that new person.  

With hundreds of employees on site every day, we were doing everything possible to support and encourage people to do the right thing every time. That’s what would keep me up at night.  

Q: How did TRACK help with safety? 

BRUCE: Two of the most important things for me were: The ratio of entry-level skilled employees and supervisors to crafts. 

TRACK allowed me to measure both easily. You can go into TRACK and run a skill report and see the skill levels. Whether they were a carpenter or pipefitter, it was important to know their skill levels. You could make sure a vendor wasn’t inundating you with helper class workers. The entry-level skilled person is the highest-risk person in the crew. I wanted my supervisor ratio to be about 6- or 8-to-1. Making sure I had enough field supervisors to ensure safe efficient work.  

Q: How has managing fatigue thresholds changed? 

BRUCE: Before TRACK, we used an Excel spreadsheet to keep up with who had exceeded the number of hours or days they were on the job. It was a nightmare and there were no automated email alerts. With TRACK, you have automated email alerts and fatigue dashboards, so you get an alert when someone is nearing and/or exceeding their thresholds.  

In the past, employees didn’t tell their supervisors they were exceeding the fatigue guidelines. Now, employees are held accountable for following the fatigue guidelines because TRACK is providing managers with a tool to make sure what they put in place is being adhered to.  

The fatigue management tool TRACK provides is amazing. Without it, there was no notification or proactive monitoring. Everything was reactive.  

With TRACK, the software is the middleman, keeping people safe on the job. 

Q: Can you describe a typical plant emergency—before and after using TRACK? 

BRUCE: My role in our Emergency Operations Center was the logistics coordinator and I needed to account for and know the location of every maintenance and support person in the plant. I would sometimes need to move resources in response to the event. They may request electricians so I would have to find the right electricians and ask them to go address an issue, like a live wire.  

Pre-TRACK, I didn’t have any real-time visibility of where people were in the facility. I would have to go to security and ask where people are located. Or I was on the phone or radio calling people.  

My plant covered over 700 acres with a dozen rally points so I would have to call or radio asking about who was at each rally point—by name and company. Then, I compared and matched the names to a daily force report. For example, a fire may burn for two hours and it’s out before I’ve accounted for everyone. It was an absolute nightmare. 

After TRACK, it’s a different world. I seldom had to ask anyone about the location of people. I pull up TRACK to see where people scanned. I know who is in the facility, who has exited, and who is at what rally point. With card readers at every rally point, I could account for most employees in just a few minutes. I could then focus on who was missing. But the heavy lifting was done with TRACK.  

With TRACK, you knew where everyone was in the plant. If the event conditions worsened or the wind changed, you could move people to a different location.