After graduating from AUP or your home university you decide to pursue disaster management as a career. You have obtained a Masters in safety and disaster management from universities such as Berkeley, Louisiana State or Copenhagen and armed with this knowledge and much enthusiasm you sought employment and have just landed a nice paying job as a safety process and culture coordinator for a large French multinational company that constructs oil and gas facilities throughout the world.
After a few months getting to know your colleagues on the safety process team at headquarters (12 persons) you have been assigned to work on a massive project -building a natural gas facility in Kazarkstan. The facility is a joint venture of the Kazarkstan government (51%) , Chinese (34%) and Russian interests (15%) ostensibly private but tightly controlled respectively by the Chinese communist party and oligarchs close to Putin.
The enormous project -$15 billion total investment of which $3 billion is for the construction of the facilities (contract price for your company) is running late (7 months) and is increasing over budget.
Your company performs the sophisticated design work and some construction but mostly sub-contracts the performance of the work on site to other smaller construction and specially firms (European, Chinese and Kazark).
The safety culture at your company compares favorably with others in the industry (which as you know has had serious issues as a whole) but little or no such culture apparently exists with the customer (joint venture company) nor with any of the Chinese, Kazark companies or for that matter most of the European ones.
There have been several work-related accidents on the Project (work in progress for 2 years) with tens of injuries and 4 deaths . These accidents were caused or affected 4 of the sub-contractors-2 Chinese, 1 European and 1 Kazark as well as the joint venture customer.
Your boss (who reports to one of the 6 deputy project managers) appears pleasant and motivated to improve safety (both for workers) and process to avoid major disasters (eg. BP Texas City, Deepwater. Massey or worse )
However, he knows nothing of safety and is rarely available to help you make your way.
He therefore gives you considerable autonomy to develop the safety culture.
You prepare and communicate safety awareness seminars but few employees show up despite the support (on paper) shown by senior management for your efforts.
You are now at a point where you believe that inspections would be appropriate. You have conducted three (accompanied by an engineer near retirement who knows the industry and is well respected). On the third inspection you notice a general lack of seriousness amongst the workers, poor follow up of safety procedures on site and a macho attitude which is dismissive of your efforts and especially your warnings of future disasters.
A week after your third inspection an accident occurs leading to serious injury (no deaths). It could have been much worse and you are very concerned about the risk of a major blow-out
You go to your boss relate your concerns and ask him to bring it to senior management attention. He does so (without much conviction) but is told not to rock the boat as your concerns have drifted to the customer who was less than happy with your creating unnecessary tension and in a menacing tone told the Project Manager you—-are behind schedule and we will not tolerate it much longer-we know there is danger from time to time but that is the nature of the business. We have had many near misses on this and other projects but that is nothing to worry about.
How should you proceed? What problems do you think exist and how should this be addressed?
Why is it important to understand and taken into account the training, mores, professional approach and motivation of different professions-engineers, lawyers, financiers, executives, physicians, politicians, bureaucrats and the public in designing and implementing your safety and disasters culture?
This take-home Final exam should be typed, double-spaced and in submitted in a format the professor can easily open-eg. WORD or Pdf. Avoid others that require Acrobat, etc
There is no minimum nor maximum page or word count. Rough Estimated length as a guide-8 pages (4 for each question)
Cite assigned readings and any additional sources you use.
GOOD LUCK