Young Engineer Champions Process Safety Via Social Media

In this year-end episode, hosts Trish Kerin and Traci Purdum welcome Hayley Little, a U.K.-based process safety engineer who tracks quarterly catastrophic incidents on LinkedIn. The discussion explores origin stories in process safety, the critical gap in fundamental safety knowledge outside petrochemical industries, and the alarming frequency of preventable incidents in lower-hazard sectors. They discuss innovative solutions including AI tools, virtual reality training and social media outreach to democratize process safety education. The conversation emphasizes the urgent need for better university training, field presence over desk work and human factors integration to make it easier to "accidentally get it right."

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to Process Safety with Trish and Traci, the podcast that aims to share insights from past incidents to help avoid future events. Please subscribe to this free, award-winning podcast on your favorite platform so you can continue learning with Trish and me in this series. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing, and joining me as always is Trish Kerin, director of Lead Like Kerin. Trish, as we wrap up 2025, I want to know: What's been your biggest adventure this year?

Trish: Wow, what a year it has been. As I'm sure most of you will remember, in January I left the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and I've been working for myself since then, doing contracts with some companies. I think one of the most amazing things is I've gotten to spend quite a bit of time in Morocco this year, which has been fantastic. In fact, I'm heading to Morocco again tomorrow for another two weeks, which will be my final trip for the year. All in all, I'll have spent six weeks in Morocco this year. Shout-out to all my friends over in Morocco — fabulous country, amazing people, and I really enjoy visiting them and working with them, so I'm looking forward to my next adventure tomorrow.

Traci: That's wonderful. It's been fun to watch you move from IChemE to your own venture and all of the adventures you've had along the way. It's been a pleasure, and our work together has taken us on some interesting turns and twists. We've earned the coveted Neal Award for best podcast, and we've covered myriad lessons learned from past incidents. We've also had several guests along the way, and today we are hosting another interesting guest whom you suggested. So a big welcome to Hayley Little, a process safety engineer with a similar course as ours, highlighting safety incidents. Thanks for joining us for our last podcast episode of the year, Hayley.

Hayley: Thanks for having me. Really looking forward to being on.

Traci: Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background?

Hayley: Yes. I studied chemical engineering, graduated in 2019. My first job was on a petrochemical site, and that was my first real introduction to process safety. I've had a stint in mining, and now I'm in the energy sector, but this was my first process safety role. I decided — and I might have gone slightly heavy with the rebranding on process safety on my LinkedIn.

Traci: Wonderful. And where are you based?

Hayley: In Wilton, in the U.K.

Roundup of Catastrophic Safety Incidents

Traci: You mentioned — we both mentioned — your LinkedIn profile. Trish had sent me something along those lines. You use the account to showcase process safety incidents, and every quarter you do this roundup of catastrophic events. How long have you been doing this, and what's the thinking behind it?

Hayley: I've only started it this year. Like I said, I got into process safety and wanted to go heavy on the rebranding. Personally, I had tried to look in the past for a roundup or any figures on how often process safety incidents are happening, because I've seen the reports on older incidents but couldn't really find much. So I decided, why not have a go at doing it myself? That's when I published the first article, just after quarter one ended of 2025. I've been slightly inspired because the only thing I had found before that was a couple of YouTube videos that the CCPS had done that provided an overview of what the major incidents were in 2020 and 2019, I think. But it looked like that tailed off. I wasn't sure if anyone would even read it when I first did it, but the response has been quite good. So that's just turned into something that I do now. I think I got a bit better at it because in the first quarter I only logged 26 incidents or something. I have a feeling those numbers were probably miles out, considering the numbers that I got for the later quarters. After I'd done the first one, I ran the article through ChatGPT, and that gave me keywords that I could use to search in the later quarters. So I think that's where the big boost in numbers comes from — not that the world just got massively worse in April.

Heed the Call of Process Safety

Traci: Well, yes, let's hope that wasn't the case, the latter part there. And Trish, listening to Hayley, I feel like this is probably you when your career started. Can you tell us a little bit about when you knew process safety was your calling?

Trish: Yes. They say everybody has an origin story in process safety, don't they? At some point there's something that has triggered us to really go in heavy on process safety. For me, it was interesting. I actually experienced two process safety incidents that I had been the direct cause of, where I had made decisions and something had gone wrong. Fortunately, in both incidents there was nobody hurt, but they were still a process safety event and still had the potential. I was a very young graduate engineer in both of them. It took me a while to really learn about process safety. So those moments weren't my a-ha moment. My a-ha moment was when the Longford explosion happened in Victoria in 1998. I was working at the Altona refinery at the time. I was the production coordinator in the off-sites area, responsible for all the tanks, all the blending, all the crude coming in, all the products going out, all the pipelines, all the shipping. I remember that day because I was standing in the planner's office talking about the plan when all of a sudden the phone rang, and the planner got a phone call from another site called Long Island Point, which is an intermediate point between Longford and Altona. At that point in time, we were told that there had been an explosion at Longford, and we had no further information. So we turned on the radio because this was before the days of looking at something on the internet. We turned on the radio and heard the breaking news reports that there were two people missing. It was at that point we all just looked at each other, and we knew that when there's been an explosion like they're talking about and there's two people missing, they are not missing. I walked into the control room and saw my own operators and the looks on their faces — and that was the moment it really hit me. So for me, it was the death of John and Peter on that day, Sept. 25, 1998. That was my turning point where I went, this can't happen. We have to do things so this doesn't happen anymore. And that's when I started to move toward a safety journey. It took me a while to get there. I wasn't immediate, but I did eventually get there.

Traci: You have commemorated John and Peter several times, and I think that is poignant. It's something that makes you continue to do everything that you do every single day and helps others and myself understand this a little bit better. You mentioned your origin story. Hayley, let's talk a little bit about your origin story. Have you been involved in any sort of process safety incidents? Have you witnessed anything? Let's dig deeper into why you're in process safety.

Hayley: I guess for me it started off quite early. Like I said, I had a pretty good introduction on my first job. I was working on a top-tier COMAH site, olefins cracker, and my first line manager, Dan, was great, and he was trying to teach me all sorts of things. I remember the first time he took me out on plant. He was like, "How many ways do you think you can die on this plant?" I was quite imaginative, and I'd watched 1,000 Ways to Die, so I was like, 1,000. I think what really made me take it seriously was I'd just been working maybe three months, and then just opposite across the road from where I was working there was an old abandoned steelworks that was undergoing demolition. This was September 2019, and there was an explosion on that site, and that killed two workers taking it down. Obviously I didn't witness it, but I lived close enough and worked close enough to see the smoke coming up for days from there. And I think that hit me early on. I was like, that's not even a plant that was running or had anything in it. So that one brought it home for me. I guess I promised myself that I wouldn't — like if anyone ever died on my watch doing engineering work, I'd call it a day. So from then I took it much more seriously and tried to learn as much as I could, because I didn't ever want to send somebody off on a job and they didn't come back from that. So I had a bit of a reality check early on.

Traci: Trish, do you want to add something to that? I think that probably resonates with you.

Trish: Yeah, it does. I find it really interesting, Hayley, that in both of our examples, we didn't know the people involved. I didn't know John and Peter. I now know their names. I know the history of their family now because I've looked at it. But neither of us actually knew the people involved. Yet it was enough of an impact to be able to connect it and realize that could happen to someone we know, or indeed it could happen because of something we did. Thank you for sharing that story. I do remember the news reports of that incident. I think it's really powerful for people to realize that these things can and do happen, and as engineers, we're the people that have the ability to try and stop these things happening.

ChatGPT & Process Safety

Traci: Hayley, you talked about ChatGPT already, and I read that you have this interesting project. It's Accidents of the Future, and you use ChatGPT to help you formulate that. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Hayley: Yes. That one was with the IChemE Loss Prevention Bulletin. So they've got the series, the Accidents of the Future. I looked at it and thought, I want to contribute to this, but rather than me coming up with something, I wanted to ask ChatGPT instead, just out of curiosity to see what it came up with. So I ran it basically: What major industrial disasters do you reckon might be repeated in the future? And it came out with a few suggestions, but then it also justified why it thought that would happen and what mitigation could be put in place. I actually thought the results were much better than I expected them to be. So I submitted that to the IChemE, and they decided to publish it. It got quite a bit of attention. I do actually think it got more attention than anything I would have written would have got, just because of the controversy with it being AI. So there was the natural team of people like, "Oh my God, this is brilliant, we need to be using this." And then the other people who reacted like, "We're all going to die now, we're relying on ChatGPT." But I was like, it was an innocent question. None of us know which one's going to happen next, I guess. Given enough time, they all would. But the response was very interesting.

Traci: Well, we talk often about how there are no new incidents, no new accidents — that we keep repeating the same accidents. That's something that Trish carries on through this whole series of Process Safety with Trish and Traci. Trish, what are your thoughts on using AI as a crystal ball and having that factor in?

Trish: Look, I think there's incredible power in what we can be harnessing these large language models to do. Using things like ChatGPT or whichever one is your preferred — I think there's enormous ability to have it flag up something for you to consider. You don't need to take it as gospel and go, "This is exactly it. This is perfect. This is right," because chances are it's not. There's going to be something wrong with it, but it's going to get you to think about something that you may have not thought of yourself. I think in process safety that is where there is such huge power in this — where we can actually say, "Well, I hadn't thought about that, but under these circumstances it is possible. Let's go and study that. Let's look at it. Do we have the right mitigations in place if it was to happen? Can we prevent it so it doesn't happen?" So I think there's really big opportunity in this space to use it in that area. The other thing is, a lot of what I do now is working with people on how to prime their minds to look for the weak signals. If we can actually see the information that ChatGPT or whichever AI we're using is giving us and say, "Oh, OK, there's actually something in that that's important," and work on priming that into our brain, then we'll actually notice the signals as it is starting to occur in real life. We'll get that uneasy feeling. We'll get that feel, that gut feeling, that thought that this is not right, there's something about to go wrong, and we get a chance to intervene and take action at that point. So I think it's really quite powerful. Hayley, good on you for really challenging some of the old-school thoughts in that space of what on earth would this silly computer program know? Because we really need to be making sure we continue to evolve our thinking in process safety, because the same things we're doing today will not solve tomorrow's problems, because they haven't even solved today's problems. So we really need to be more creative and more willing to experiment and try. So good on you for that, too.

Surprising Patterns & Trends

Traci: Hayley, and absolutely right, Trish — we're going to talk a little bit more about the evolution and how to move from the past into the future in terms of process safety, and it'll be an interesting conversation here. But Hayley, you have set out to analyze data from incidents, and you want to do it by industry and incident type. How hard of a task has this been for you, and have you seen any patterns or trends that have surprised you in this undertaking?

Hayley: Yes. This has been harder than I thought it would be. But like I said, even just from trying to track the incidents, I soon realized there were a hell of a lot more of them than I thought there would be. And then just something as simple as an industry list — I thought would exist. They don't really. So I had somebody on LinkedIn message me a link to the CSB website, and there were these little cards that catalogued or briefly summed up certain incidents that had happened before, and they had industry type on and the incident type on. So I used those a little bit, but I think I ended up spending a week in an empty room in my house with Post-it notes, just moving them around a wall until I thought I got a system that worked. And then I was trying to catalogue the new incidents that I was finding, and I was still adding things to it. So I'm still not entirely sure if I'm done yet with the actual categorization. I keep flipping between thinking I've gone too detailed or not detailed enough, so I'll see where that pans out. In terms of trends from incidents, I've been surprised — well, I've seen this a little bit in my working life, from where I started in a top-tier COMAH petrochemical type — the level of process safety knowledge there versus other places is vastly a world apart from each other. I think this is noticeable. So one of the things I was shocked about is how many hazardous entries there have been, like with just sewers and hydrogen sulfide. I think I found about 10, and not a single one of them — they've all ended up being multiple fatalities, at least, because other people followed them in. I remember, I think it was week one, getting shown the Valero video from the CSB when I first started work. But obviously that level of awareness isn't there. So a lot of people who are into process safety that would consider this to be basic knowledge — I don't think it is common knowledge or widely spread outside of major accident hazard industries. So that was a big one. Also, just the number of incidents — there's still refineries and oil and gas plants catching fire, but most of the fatalities seem to be in the lower-hazard industry, certainly sites that wouldn't fall under COMAH or Seveso or anything. I was also shocked to realize that I think three of the incidents that have caused the most fatalities this year were just trucks and LPG tankers that have crashed, which I don't think is something that I would have necessarily originally thought about that much. I just think of process safety being on the plant or on a storage facility, not necessarily the transport in between. So that one was interesting as well.

Traci: Trish, your commentary on that — I know you're dying to say something here.

Trish: Yes. I absolutely echo everything that you've just highlighted there. I think we still have a massive gap in fundamental basic process safety knowledge in any facility that is just handling a little bit of dangerous goods around the place without actually really understanding what's going on. Those classics of the sewers in the water industry and those sort of things that we see as well — the chance that a confined space entry is going to kill multiple people is really, really high. Yet people do it all the time, and they do it without thinking. They enter, plumbers into trenches in someone's backyard where there then happens to be the ingress of LPG, which is heavier than air. So it's going to sit in the trench, and it's going to asphyxiate them. All sorts of things like this happen all over the place, and they are just such basic fundamental process safety things. I think that's really one of the biggest issues here — that we've got all this knowledge, and how do we get it to the people that need it the most at the moment? Because if you do start your career in petrochemical, you are going to be trained in this stuff. From day one, you are going to be trained in all of these basic fundamentals. When you talk to people that have been really successful and had very long careers in process safety, all of us started in that sector in some way, either in chemical or petrochemical. We all started there because that's where we got this amazing training. But I really worry about that graduate engineer that goes into the small factory — they might be the only engineer that company has ever employed. So who's there to actually mentor and develop and train and educate that poor graduate when they're the only engineer there, and they're expected to know stuff that they just don't necessarily know? And there's no way they would know any of it because it's not taught at university. And some of it's just experience — that's not taught either. Obviously you've got to have that yourself. So I think we've got a big gap there, and I'm not quite sure what the solution is, but it does worry me.

Traci: Hayley, what are your thoughts on that with your peers and you being a younger engineer in the industry? Do you feel like your peers are missing out on these important lessons?

Hayley: Yes, definitely. Like Trish said, when I was at university, I don't think the word process safety was ever mentioned. We didn't cover any of it at all. I realized that I was very lucky to start off in the company that I did. I think that gave me a lot of information that I don't think I would have got anywhere else. I don't really know how to — I don't think I could fathom if I'd have started just in, I don't know, a water company or somewhere — you wouldn't even know, because you haven't been taught it at university or even told of its existence. You don't even know to go look it up. Do you know what I mean? You just wouldn't know. So I definitely think there's a gap there.

Trish: You've got this unconscious incompetence. You just don't even realize you don't know it, because it's just not ever something that's even remotely crossed your mind if you've never had any introduction to it. So that's a challenge.

Innovation Opportunities

Traci: What do you think are the biggest innovation opportunities out there, and how can we push this forward? I know that's a big question, and it's a question that we can't answer, but I'm sure you both have some thoughts on that. Not all at once.

Trish: You want to go first, Hayley?

Hayley: As in, what — innovation is in something technical, or how to solve the problem of just getting information to the right people?

Trish: Either, I think.

Traci: Both, yes.

Hayley: OK, well I guess that's why I've randomly started posting things on LinkedIn. I have ideas of maybe getting into YouTube or something in the future, just to get it out there to everyone. So a lot of the people who message me or ask me questions or comment on my stuff — like technicians — they're not engineers, they're not graduates, but they definitely will be affected and need to know information. A, they're in the line of fire, and B, they're going to be potentially people that are inadvertently making a mistake because they don't know. And so I do think a lot of the information is kept within organizations or institutions that if you're not an engineer or somebody who will be a member of that, you wouldn't come across it. So I think getting it more mainstream — so like I said, I've been contemplating maybe a YouTube channel as well, just to actually reach a lot of the maintenance workers and the technicians and the operators that aren't exposed to it, and they're certainly not exposed to it if they're working in a sector where even the engineers don't have the process safety knowledge. So I do think just basically trying to make it more mainstream and accessible will go a long way — making sure that this information is actually reaching the right people rather than being the belief that it always comes from leadership and that some manager somewhere is going to make sure that gets to the person, because I don't think in many cases that's true. So I think that's one thing. And on the innovation side of things, I know everybody's hyped up with the AI, and I use ChatGPT myself. I think that's a good thing, but I think one area that's slept on that I think might be interesting will be virtual reality. I think this could be used potentially a lot in recreating scenarios and going through your emergency drills, or with panel technicians — if you've simulated a scenario going wrong and how they'll actually respond under pressure for it, because a lot of places it's just procedure, and you're like, yeah, I get that, but it's completely different to doing that under pressure. And so I was like, if you could literally go around the plant on fire — you've got one of your COMAH scenarios going on, but obviously it's just simulated — I think this could bring it home to a lot of the operators. And A, they could visualize what was happening, and B, also really recreate how they would have to respond under pressure and the stress of the situation. So I think that'd be — I don't know if it exists, I just thought it'd be a good idea.

How Has Process Safety Evolved?

Traci: I think there are iterations of that. I don't know if they've fully evolved in this end, but there are iterations of the virtual reality and putting operators in those scenarios. But Trish, I want to get your take on when you started process safety education and how it has evolved, and bringing to point some of the things that Hayley just said.

Trish: Yes. In terms of looking at process safety education, as I said earlier, if you join a big company, you get some amazing education opportunities and you go and learn some fantastic things. But I think we need to think how we get that message out more broadly. As Hayley said, we need to get that message out to the people that aren't necessarily going to have the mentor or the boss or the institution behind them to provide them with all that information. That's one of the reasons why I think this podcast is so great to continue to do, Traci, because I'll visit plants all over the world, and operators, maintainers, people will come up to me and talk about the podcast, which actually says that we're getting this message out to a really wide range of people. The number of people that actually really love listening to podcasts, I think, is fascinating. So a lot of people have their favorites and they listen to them every edition. So I think that's a good one. I love the idea if you're starting a YouTube channel, Hayley. I think that's also a great thing. I've done a lot of work with people in science communication. So basically where we take complex ideas and communicate them to the general public. When we actually communicate in that way, we get to the point where people can understand it no matter what role they are in the organization, because we're actually communicating to the general-public level. So you don't need to be an engineer to understand because we're not talking engineering at you. We don't need to talk engineering at you, we need to have a communication where everybody understands what's needed. So I think some of those tools and techniques are going to be really even more important to continue to spread the knowledge, because if we're not getting it any other way, then we need to do that. I also would love to see universities improve on how they teach process safety to their engineers. But again, that's just the engineering cohort. But I think there's certainly a lot of improvement that can be done in that space in terms of just creating that initial early awareness, which is really important.

Hayley: I don't even know what the word would be for this one, because I don't think I've ever seen anywhere — a physical presence. A lot of the time I see people doing process safety and they've just done the LOPAs or the PHAs that's on a spreadsheet somewhere. Nobody out on plant knows what's on there. And nobody who was in the PHA knows — they've taken credit for things that aren't out there in the field. They don't have that relationship where an operator or a technician will come to you if they think that they've got a concern or a problem. I think that's something that's off — basically that it's not a department and it's not just something — it's not a discipline that you can just do from your desk.

Traci: Trish?

Trish: Yes. I think for me, I would love to see more human factors applied in our designs and our operations so that it's easier to accidentally get it right than it is to accidentally get it wrong. That way we can eliminate a whole lot of issues by just accepting that humans are not logical creatures. We do not operate on pure logic. We operate on emotion, and that's how we make decisions, and we just act on things. So we need to accept that that is a human condition and work with it, not try to rally against it and force people into structures. I would love to see really effective real-time communication. So somehow our plant can communicate to us that we've got a problem over here and that's elevated our risk, so we need to have these additional controls in place, or even indeed the controls have automatically been initiated because the plant has recognized it. An intelligent plant in some way. I don't know, maybe I'm getting a bit too weird there in that wish. Engagement at all levels. I love what Hayley said. You can't do process safety sitting behind a desk. Engagement at all levels, from the chief executive all the way down, everybody out talking, engaging, communicating. And then lastly, underpinning competence. Let's try and get that fundamental basic knowledge into people first.

Hayley: Yes, and I'd say sharing lessons learned as well, because it's incredible how some places — operators aren't even familiar with incidents that have happened previously on their own plant, never mind anyone else's. So knowledge retention, I guess.

Trish: Yes. I think one of the things we get hung up in is we think that sharing lessons is all we need to do. Sharing is nice, and sharing is lovely, and it's the first step, but sharing is not learning. Sharing is just sharing. So then we need to really cement that learning in. But it does have to start with the sharing. If we're not even doing the sharing, then there's nothing to do with it at that point.

Solving Chemical Industry Problems

Traci: If you could solve one problem in the chemical industry tomorrow, what would it be? Trish, I'm going to put you in the hot seat first.

Trish: Oh, what would it be? One problem in the chemical industry? I think I'd go back to human factors again. I think human factors is a massive key for us as a species to continue. I think if we can solve that in the chemical industry, we can solve a lot of our problems.

Traci: Hayley, what's your take on that?

Hayley: I guess over here at the moment it just seems like solve the energy costs, otherwise we're not going to have a chemical industry. Obviously we're seeing this with a lot of companies closing. What also concerns me with this, from a process safety point of view, is obviously that means the other companies — everyone's feeling the sting, budgets are cut, and there's going to be cuts to maintenance in other areas. I've got concerns that process safety will be compromised as well through that.

Traci: It touches everywhere for sure. Trish, anything you want to add to wrap this all up? I mean, it was a great conversation, an interesting conversation to hear Hayley's take on all of this.

Trish: Yes, I'd actually just like to thank you, Hayley, for making a decision to go all-in on process safety on your LinkedIn and tackle a project that I think would terrify most people — tackle it, go after it and produce something that is really valuable for the world. So I would just like to thank you for doing that. I think you're making an amazing contribution, and it really excites me to see the next generations coming through making these exciting contributions to process safety.

Hayley: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I was just glad that I've had a really good reaction to what I'm doing as well, because I mean, you might say bold enough to take this on — I think it's just insane enough, really. So it's been great. I've had lots of people reach out and motivate me to keep going, and the reaction's been really good. So it hasn't just been entirely one-sided. So it's good to see. Hopefully there'll be a wider movement.

Traci: Well, definite kindred spirits, and both of you making it easier for us to accidentally get it right — just disseminating this information in interesting ways and really touching different parts that people wouldn't think about. So I appreciate both of you for that. Thank you very much. Unfortunate events happen all over the world, and we will be here to discuss and learn from them. Subscribe to this free podcast so you can stay on top of best practices. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you run efficient and safe facilities. On behalf of Trish and Hayley, I'm Traci, and this is Process Safety with Trish and Traci. Thanks again, you two.

Trish: Stay safe.