Safety must come first for all firms

The Dorchester Hotel on London's Park Lane is not the sort of place you would expect to receive a safety briefing before dinner. The Dorchester is a benchmark for hotel luxury and home to billionaires and A-list celebrities when they stay in London.

However, before sitting down to a banquet at the hotel recently, I had to listen to a detailed safety briefing on where the emergency exits were, what the fire alarm sounded like etc. The briefing took longer than it does on a plane.

The reason for the caution was that dinner was being hosted by BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company. The audience may have been British politicians and City financiers but the company still went through its normal safety drill as though we were miners about to start work in a pit.

The hazards are so numerous in a mine that a culture of safety is hammered into employees. Nothing gets done without first addressing safety, which is only sensible when you work in an environment where the machinery is built for giants. The dumper trucks used in opencast mines, for example, are so massive that they could squash a Toyota Landcruiser and not even notice they had done so.

This safety culture extends to every part of what big mining companies do, even dinner at the Dorchester. Something similar happened at a lunch with the chief executive of Rio Tinto a couple of years ago. We were at the company's headquarters in one of Mayfair's more exclusive areas but were still given the full safety briefing before sitting down to eat.

Then, as we departed, the CEO asked me to put my seatbelt on in the taxi on the way back to my office. It seemed odd that the boss of a $100 billion (Dh367bn) company should care enough to lecture me on road safety but by focussing on these little details, Rio's staff are always on the look out to prevent situations that could potentially lead to an accident.

The same cannot be said for BP. Mining industry executives are pretty derogatory about what they see as the lax safety and environmental standards within the oil industry and BP's recent troubles would seem to prove their point.

BP is currently in trouble in the United States after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and created a huge oil slick that is threatening the coast. The accident has been a terrible tragedy in both ecological and human terms and BP is rightly being castigated for it.

Recent attempts to stop the well pouring more oil into the Gulf of Mexico appear to be working, which will take some of the heat of BP. But long-term damage has already been done to the company's reputation and it may find that further expansion in the US becomes impossible.

Indeed, the anti-BP rhetoric from some politicians in the US is becoming distinctly xenophobic and it is no coincidence that the company is continually referred to as "British Petroleum", despite not carrying that name for many years.

If Deepwater Horizon had been an isolated incident, BP might be due some sympathy given the battering it is taking in the US – particularly as the doomed rig was actually operated by another company. Unfortunately, the mess in the Gulf of Mexico is only the latest accident to blight BP's operations.

Five years ago an explosion at BP's Texas City refinery killed 15 workers and injured a further 170. The accident was caused by poor maintenance that led to a build up of gas in one area, which was then ignited by a contractor turning the ignition on his truck.

Four years ago, a leak was found in pipelines connecting BP's oil operations in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Further investigation found a series of leaks and severe corrosion in the pipes. The suspicion was that BP had not maintained the pipes properly because of cost cutting and this is under investigation by US authorities. BP denies these allegations.

If BP had suffered one accident on the scale of Texas City, Prudhoe Bay or Deepwater Horizon, that could be forgivable given hazards all oil producers face. But three in five years looks like negligence.

BP needs to learn from the mining industry and make safety the heart of everything it does, even when executives are dining at the Dorchester.

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