ABSTRACT
I was working at a downstream oil site once, when I came across a document related to risk management. This, I thought, was nothing strange: after all, these oil people can blow up their plant or burn things that weren’t supposed to burn. They can kill themselves and a whole bunch of people in the neighborhoods surrounding the site. Not to mention create spills and contaminations. So sure, they have risk management going on all the time, and there are probably good, formalized, standardized ways in which that is done. The document I came across was only a couple of pages long, which was unusual. Normally, they were much longer than that. Intrigued, I turned over the first page to discover what the risk assessment was about. Of all the risks facing the site, this must have been the darkest and scariest of all. The risk assessment, in all seriousness, evaluated the merits and demerits of supplying individually wrapped teabags in the office break room versus putting a box of unwrapped teabags on the counter. In an industry that is used to thinking in terms of barriers and layers of defense, I wasn’t surprising to find out – on the last page – that individually wrapped teabags were deemed more hygienic and thus appropriate for the office staff. An individually wrapped teabag, after all, has an extra layer of defense against the grubby hands that are fishing for one in the breakroom. What this risk assessment did not mention was that Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) solved the hazard a long time ago. To be of any use at all, tea bags get dunked in (almost) boiling water, which deals nicely with any of the imagined biohazards. And fascinatingly, though unsurprisingly, the resources industry regulator could not give a toss about risk assessing tea bags. The whole initiative was driven by the organization’s bureaucracy itself. What the risk assessment also didn’t mention was that the demountable trailer that contained the break room and its quaintly risk-assessed teabags could be wiped off the face of the earth in the kind of Texas City explosion that, during the very same year, wrecked a similar site half a world away, killing 15 people and injuring more than 180 others.
