Forest’s Paper on Process Safety Still the Best 10 Years Later

BATON ROUGE, LA – In 2015, LSU Chemical Engineering Adjunct Lecturer Jerry Forest’s paper on conduct of operations, “Walk the Line,” was published in peer-reviewed journal Process Safety Progress. That same year, it won Best Paper at the Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS) of the Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS). Both of these honors came on the heels of “Walk the Line” winning the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care Initiative of the Year honor in 2014.

Now, nearly 10 years later, that paper has been updated—appropriately titled “Ten Years of Walk the Line”—and published in Process Safety Progress. It has also been chosen by the GCPS as one of the best papers of the last decade.

The topic of the paper is a conduct-of-operations model to reduce Human Factor process safety incidents. Conduct of operations is an area of process safety concerned with how operators work to produce consistent results. Forest created the model, “Walk the Line,” in 2010 while working at Celanese. It emphasizes reducing Human Factor incident causes by addressing conduct of operations system design, ensuring operational continuity, managing open bleed valves, utilizing line-up tools, maintaining operational readiness, and improving engineering discipline. The model ultimately proved so successful that during his 13 years with the company, process safety incidents dropped by 90%.

Today, Forest estimates that it is used by more than 50 companies worldwide.

“The fact that I’ve had a global influence on reducing process safety incidents is extremely rewarding and proves that we can all make a difference by thinking big, sharing practices, and driving excellence in process safety,” Forest said. “These tools and concepts are built from my 40 years of experience in industry with conduct of operations, especially operational and engineering discipline efforts started at Lyondell. There, I had exceptional leaders who built systems that drove a strong process safety culture. Also, sharing the information with [American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers members] allowed industry to share great ideas and practices that further advanced improvement across the globe.”

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