These days the one thing I love about my job is when a client actually asks me to lessen their risks through safety engineering. Yes, I went to school and got my BS in OSH and my MS in SE and they are stunningly different applications. With one, I help companies with their OSHA compliance matters and that is fundamental to building a strong safety foundation. But OSHA compliance is the MINIMUM and I am lucky to have such a great group of core clients who oftentimes go well beyond OSHA compliance. Take one of my international clients who has chlorine. I have been working with these folks for 16 years – one of my very first clients when I started consulting in 2004. The VP of operations was a former colleague at one of my former plants where we managed large inventories of chlorine. He wanted to bring those engineering and administrative controls over to his new employer. We did and their LOPC events dropped by 97% over a 3-year period; but with chlorine, we need this to be a 100% reduction. So not being able to achieve this mark, the client took my advice and reduced their inventories substantially. They went from running off a 55-ton railcar to using a bank of four (4) 1-ton cylinders. This worked for several years and they continued to achieve fewer LOPC events; which when working with 1-ton cylinders says a lot because the probability of an LOPC event increases substantially when making and breaking many more connections over the same time period. But with 1-ton cylinders we are still working with chlorine in a liquefied Pressurized Gas state and thus we had to store the cylinders in a specially designed room (gas room/building) that was remote (e.g. facility siting). And with the handling of cylinders, costs can go up considerably and the increased handling increases operational costs, as well as workers, are having to interact with the process much more often. This increased interaction also increases risks to workers; however, the catastrophic severity goes way down when comparing a 1-ton cylinder inside a specially designed building to a 55-ton railcar outside. But after a few audit findings related to administrative and physical failures in the 1-ton process, we went back to the drawing boards and looked at how risks could be reduced as well as find some cost savings to justify the capital to the “bean counters”. This is NOT a USA-based business, so projects are not compliance-driven but risk and $ driven – which some days oh I wish we could move in this direction in the USA.