Human factors engineering picks up steam in energy industries

During his first two years working at a large oil field in Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, Joel Haight saw eight people die on the job.

It was a vast operation run by Chevron Corp. in partnership with the government, and Mr. Haight was the projects safety director. The oil wells and processing plants were run by Kazakh workers, Russian supervisors and Turkish maintenance crews.

Some of the technology and job requirements were unfamiliar, and cultural tensions wedged themselves into work. The first time there was an accident, workers rounded up the culprit and prepared to beat him up as punishment.

Mr. Haight had long had an interest in human factors engineering which includes designing machines and processes to match the humans who would be carrying them out. This assignment gave him a perfect chance to mind the humans involved in designing a safety program.

"Safety is very much a human-centered process," he said. "Human factors engineering seeks to optimize and match up attributes of humans with the expectations of a job. When those are not properly matched up, people are more likely to get injured."

Human factors research dates backto the early 1900s but only recently has become a trending topic in safety.

"Designers, engineers, researchers and practitioners need to understand the human as a component in the system and as one that is interactive, variable and adaptable," Mr. Haight wrote in an article pushed in Professional Safety, a journal of the American Society of Safety Engineers,in 2007.

The discipline will be a central component of a new safety engineering certificate program at the University of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Haight now teaches.

The program is expected to launch in the fall and will be available to Pitt graduate students, as well as industry professionals. Mr. Haight and the university are hopingthe latter group will show up en masse. The programs advisory committee is stacked with heavy hitters from the oil and gas industry, including Chevron, BP and several large insurance companies.

Human factors engineering isnt necessarily intuitive to oil and gas companies, which use success metrics that tend to focus on production, productivity and growth.

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Human factors engineering picks up steam in energy industries