The BP Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe: What Are We Learning?

Complimentary Webinar Series

On April 20, 2010, an explosion and fire destroyed the Deepwater Horizon, a mobile offshore drilling platform located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast in approximately 5,000 feet of water. The explosion killed 11 workers and injured 17 more. In the weeks that followed, the damaged deep sea well continued to gush oil, creating an environmental and organizational crisis of nightmarish proportions. While the long-term impacts of the platform’s collapse will take years to unfold, the disaster has helped raise industrial safety to an issue of national and international prominence.

How effectively we learn from BP Deepwater Horizon is critically important to the oil and gas industry as well as to all industries with the potential for catastrophic outcomes. It could help shape safety practice for years to come. Most especially, our response to this event will shape how we think about serious events. Preventing future catastrophic failures is an urgent priority for safety professionals and senior executives—and for their organizations—especially for those from high hazard industries. This presentation reviews the early findings from the BP event and provides a framework for the prevention of catastrophic events.

Learning Objectives

• Gain insight into the BP tragedy and its lessons for their own organizations
• Understand the common causes that the Deepwater Horizon event shares with other industrial disasters
• Learn about the role of cognitive bias in catastrophic events
• Develop a new way of thinking about serious event prevention
• Understand the role of leadership and culture in preventing high-potential incidents.

Register

What you will need to participate in the Online Seminar:

• Access to the Internet (a 56Kbps connection or better) and a web browser to connect and view the presentation.A separate telephone line for the audio portion of the presentation.
• Prior to this event, you must click on the following link to ensure that your settings are optimized to the most current version of Microsoft Office Live.

To do so, please go to: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=90703. The test should be finished within two minutes. Please note that you may need to disable pop-up blockers or firewalls to view this event.

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