POST – It would seem based at least partially on the assessments of the various agencies involved that the accident was solely the fault of the Imperial Sugar company and it’s management. Certainly it appears that the Imperial Sugar company was aware of the structural and mechanical limitations of the building as well as the potential danger of dust explosion as per memos (Wikipedia, 2018). This strongly implies that while aware of the situation that they choose to ignore it for whatever reason. One likely guess is that they had failed to properly reinvest profits from operations in modernization and safety prevention. Further their 2007 financial statements admit that any damage to the facility would have a material effect on their financial position (Wikipedia, 2018).
This strongly implies that upper management was afraid of shutting down the facility, even temporarily, for repairs and renovations. Heinrich’s Domino Theory (Cleveland State University, n.d.) supports this position in that the explosion was actually the causation of a series of decisions that lead to an eventual industrial incident. Certainly numerous decisions were made over the years leading up to 2008 about whether to modernize various systems, how to invest profits, and about repairs and other capital investments. Further the company appeared to have been extremely lax in its implementation of evacuation and fire response drills (Wikipedia, 2018). Of course many of these decisions may not have been conscious decisions to ignore safety so much as not having management that was adequately considering alternatives and worse case scenarios. Further, after a certain point, certainly by 2007 the company may not have been in a good financial position to make the needed improvements that would have made the facility less dangerous.
I would have to imagine that management thought a catastrophic explosion and process failure had the same odds of occurring as say, winning the lottery. The problem with that approach is that people do actually win the lottery. While the odds of something occurring in a particular instance may be minuscule, the cumulative probability of such an event occurring by 2008 was probably not only likely, but probably should have already happened by that point in time. Certainly, the dust explosions at other businesses suggest that it was overdue for an event to occur by 2008. References: Cleveland State University. (n.d.) Theories of Accident Causation. Retrieved from Wikipedia. (2018). 2008 Georgia Sugar Refinery Explosion. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Georgia_sugar_refinery_explosion REPLY –
