When Reliability Becomes a Safety Issue

The Line Most Plants Don’t See Coming

Your safety dashboard is green. Your TRIR is at industry benchmark. And the largest single risk to your enterprise might still be hiding in plain sight, in the condition of your assets.

I’ve sat in board reviews where the safety conversation goes exactly the same way every quarter. Total Recordable Incident Rate is down. Lost-time incidents are tracking better than peers. Hand injuries are off. The ESG report writes itself. Then the meeting moves on to capex, throughput, or the next quarterly forecast.

What rarely gets asked in those rooms, and what should be, is whether those numbers actually measure the safety risk that could end the business. In heavy industry, the answer is often no. There are two kinds of safety, and most boards are only watching one of them.

Two Kinds of Safety. Two Very Different Financial Exposures.

Occupational safety is what most KPIs track: slips, trips, falls, struck-by, lockout failures, the personal incidents that matter for every worker who walks through the gate. These are real, and they deserve real focus. But occupational safety incidents almost never threaten the existence of the enterprise.

Process safety, sometimes called asset health, is the other category. It’s about the catastrophic failures: a vessel rupture, a hydrocarbon release, a structural collapse, a runaway reaction. These events are rare. But when they happen, the consequences are measured in lives, in years of lost production, in regulatory exposure, and in nine- and ten-figure settlements. They are the events that end CEOs’ careers and, in some cases, end companies.

Occupational Safety	Process Safety / Asset Health
Tracks personal incidents, slips, trips, falls, hand injuries, lockout-tagout violations.	Tracks asset condition, equipment failure modes, containment, structural reliability.
Measured by TRIR, LTIR, near-miss reporting.	Measured by inspection compliance, equipment failure rate, leading indicators on critical assets.
Costly per incident, but rarely existential.	Rare, but historically responsible for the largest industrial losses on record.
Improves with PPE, training, behavioral programs.	Improves with reliability engineering, asset management, and capital discipline.

The Line Most Plants Don’t See Coming

Here’s the part that should keep heavy-industry CEOs up at night: a plant can be tracking world-class on occupational safety while its process safety risk is quietly compounding. The two metrics move independently. You can be improving one and degrading the other at the same time, and you won’t see it on the dashboard.

This is exactly what the U.S. Chemical Safety Board concluded after BP Texas City in 2005. Fifteen workers killed, 170 injured, the costliest refinery accident in history at over $2.1 billion in settlements alone, not counting fines, repairs, deferred production, or reputational damage. The CSB’s finding was unambiguous: BP’s safety performance was being measured “overwhelmingly on occupational safety indicators to the detriment of process safety performance monitoring.”

An internal BP report after the explosion went further, naming “the poor state of the plant equipment and the insufficiency of spending on maintenance” as contributing factors. The dashboard had been green. The plant was failing.

$2.1B+

settlements paid for the BP Texas City explosion (2005)

$20.8B

Deepwater Horizon settlement, largest environmental damage settlement in U.S. history

Top 3

mechanical health ranks among the most-cited contributing factors in process safety incident analyses

Why This Is a Structural Problem, Not an Operational One

If this were just a measurement issue, it would be easy to fix, add a few KPIs, brief the board, move on. It’s not. The reason process-safety risk hides from executive view is that the systems that produce it operate on a longer time horizon than most management cycles.

Equipment in heavy industry has a 20–40 year service life. The reliability decisions you delay this year don’t fail this year. They fail in your successor’s tenure.
Maintenance budgets are easy to cut without immediate visible consequence. A 15% reduction in maintenance spend yields savings in this quarter’s P&L, and degraded asset health that may not surface for 3 to 7 years.
Insurance markets are ahead of most boards on this. Carriers in heavy industry now scrutinize asset health programs, mechanical inspection records, and reliability metrics as part of underwriting. Premium increases of 50% year over year are no longer unusual for facilities with weak reliability data.
Regulatory exposure compounds quietly. Repeat violations and asset-health gaps that would have produced a fine ten years ago can now produce a consent decree, a forced shutdown, or criminal liability for senior leadership.

Building an Asset Health Program That Actually Closes the Gap

There’s no shortage of advice on this topic in the market. Audit your facility. Buy a software platform. Run an RCM workshop. Hire more inspectors. Each of those things has a place, but none of them, on their own, solve the problem the way it actually presents itself to a CEO.

The problem isn’t a missing tool or a missing audit. It’s the absence of a structured, ongoing program that ties asset health to the way the business is actually run. After working with operations leaders across heavy industry for many years, we keep coming back to a framework with six pillars. The discipline is to do all six together, treat them as a system, and commit to them over a multi-year horizon, not as a one-time project.

THE SIX PILLARS OF A DURABLE ASSET HEALTH PROGRAM

A reliable, defensible asset health program rests on six structural elements. Together, they shift the conversation from reacting to incidents to managing the underlying risk.

Independent Baseline Assessment

You can’t manage what you don’t measure honestly. The first step is an independent, third-party evaluation of your critical assets, your reliability program, your maintenance practices, and your workforce competency. The goal isn’t to grade the team, it’s to give the executive level a clear, defensible picture of where the gaps actually are. Self-assessments tend to confirm what leadership already believes. Independent assessments uncover what nobody on the inside is positioned to see.

Asset Criticality Framework

Not every asset carries the same risk. In a typical heavy-industry facility, roughly 10 to 15 percent of the equipment carries 80 percent of the process safety and business-continuity risk. A criticality framework ranks assets by their consequence of failure, safety, environmental, production, regulatory, and concentrates rigour where it matters. This is where executive judgment belongs: deciding which assets the organization treats as critical, and what level of investment that designation triggers.

Reliability Strategy Matched to Failure Mode

For every critical asset, the question isn’t “how often do we PM it?”, it’s “what are the failure modes, and what strategy actually addresses them?” Time-based maintenance, condition-based monitoring, predictive analytics, run-to-failure, redesign, each has a place. The discipline of reliability-centered maintenance is matching the right strategy to the right failure mode, then documenting that decision so it doesn’t depend on who happens to be in the role next year.

Verified Workforce Competency

A program is only as good as the technicians and engineers who execute it. In aviation and nuclear power, competency is verified, not assumed. In most heavy industry, it isn’t. Closing the gap means a structured competency framework: defined skills for each critical role, hands-on assessments rather than written tests, documented sign-offs, and a recurring verification cycle. This is the pillar that quietly determines whether your other five pillars deliver, because asset health work is executed at the bench, not in the boardroom.

Leading Indicators Visible at the Executive Level

Lagging indicators tell you what already went wrong. Leading indicators tell you what’s about to. A mature program tracks and reports a small, defensible set of leading metrics directly to the executive table: percentage of critical assets with current health assessments, PM compliance specifically on critical equipment, overdue inspection backlog, mechanical health finding closure rate, training completion on critical-task competencies. These don’t replace TRIR — they sit beside it, giving the board a real view of process safety risk.

Governance and Continuous Improvement

What turns a project into a program is governance. A named executive owner. A defined review cadence, typically quarterly at the executive level, monthly at operations. A formal mechanism for findings, near-misses, and incidents to feed back into the strategy and update it. Without this loop, even excellent technical work decays within two or three years as people move and priorities shift. With it, the program compounds, each year of disciplined execution makes the next year easier and cheaper.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When the six pillars operate together, the practical experience within the business changes in ways that are easy to recognize. Maintenance reviews stop being status updates and start being risk discussions. The reliability team stops being a cost centre and starts being the function that sits next to engineering on capital decisions. Insurance underwriters ask different questions on renewal, and increasingly, they offer different answers.

More importantly, the lag between an emerging health issue and the executive’s awareness of it shrinks from years to weeks. The dashboard that used to be green while the plant was failing starts telling the truth.

None of this is fast. A serious asset health program takes 18 to 36 months to mature in a facility that’s starting from a typical baseline. But the cost of not doing it is paid every quarter, in deferred maintenance debt, in risk that compounds invisibly, in insurance premiums that climb, and, in the worst case, in the kind of incident that turns a CEO’s career into a footnote in a CSB report.

What This Means for the Board Agenda

Building this program is operational work, but launching it is an executive act. The framework above doesn’t take root unless someone at the top sets the expectation, allocates the resource, and refuses to let it slide off the agenda when this quarter’s pressures take centre stage.

The most useful thing a CEO or operations director can do this month is bring four questions to the next executive review. They cost nothing to ask, and they expose immediately whether the foundation is in place or whether the work is still ahead.

FOUR QUESTIONS WORTH BRINGING TO YOUR NEXT EXECUTIVE REVIEW

1. Beyond TRIR, what process-safety leading indicators does this business track, and who owns them?

2. For our most critical assets, when was the last independent reliability and health assessment, and what did it find?

3. Over the last three years, has our maintenance and reliability spend kept pace with asset aging, or have we been quietly underinvesting?

4. What would a major insurer find if they audited our asset health program tomorrow, and would that finding affect our renewal?

If these questions don’t have clear answers from named owners, that’s the work, and it’s an executive-level conversation, not a delegated one.

Asset reliability is rarely framed as a board-level safety topic. It should be. In heavy industry, the worst incidents in history weren’t produced by occupational lapses, they were produced by mechanical health that drifted while everyone was watching the wrong indicators. The signal was always there. It just wasn’t on the page that made it to the executive review.

The CEOs I see managing this well aren’t the ones who ask for more reports. They’re the ones who change which conversation gets executive time, who put asset health on the same agenda as financial performance, and who make sure the people who run the maintenance program have a seat at the table where capital and risk decisions get made. That’s how the line stops being invisible. That’s how the next BP Texas City doesn’t happen on your watch.

Alain Pellegrino

President – Reliability Solutions

Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP), with 20+ years’ experience in reliability consulting.