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We spoke with Cam Stevens, Director of Safety Innovation at Pocketknife Group about how SpaceDraft could be used for complex incident investigations. We dove deep into the DuPont La Porte Incident, using this investigation report as an example.

Overview

The DuPont La Porte toxic chemical release incident that occurred on 15 November 2014 was a tragic event resulting in the deaths of four workers.

The incident timeline is complex, involving several personnel across four levels of a chemical manufacturing facility. It is difficult to provide a clear understanding of how the incident unfolded in a plain text report supported with still images.

SpaceDraft’s time and motion incident timeline capability enables improved understanding of how this complex incident unfolded. The visual representation of the incident improves learning potential and ability to share lessons globally.

Yellow tick Communicate incident timelines visually with animation over 33x faster than text.
Yellow tick Improve understanding of physical relationships between hazards and people.
Yellow tick Communicate complex hazard interactions with time & motion.

Existing Challenges

The DuPont La Porte toxic chemical release involved eight key personnel who all took different actions on the day of the incident. The timeline is complex and difficult to understand when communicated via plain text.

The incident unfolded in key phases including immediate actions from shift personnel, local emergency response and community emergency response.

Common issues experienced:

  • Complex timeline with several key decisions made by multiple people.
  • Difficulty to understand spatial relationship between people and hazards.
  • Incident occurred across multiple levels of the manufacturing building.

Events unfolded across 4 different levels of the manufacturing facility using northern and southern stairwells making it difficult to communicate how events unfolded without the use of an animated timeline.

Hazard prevention using SpaceDraft

With SpaceDraft, communicating key events in the incident timeline is over 33x faster than reading the text report. SpaceDraft enables common understanding of key incident events and improved ability to learn from the investigation.

Cam Stevens, Pocketknife Group Director of Safety Innovation

Solutions

SpaceDraft’s easy to use platform allows for the visualisation of critical elements of the incident timeline and subsequent emergency response.

Animating the actions of each key worker and their physical relationship to the toxic release, results in an easy to understand and easy to share incident learning experience.

Understand incident timelines

Understand the physical location of workers in relation to hazards.
Improve
learning

SpaceDrafts can be shared globally across an organisation for improved distribution and access to organisational learning.
Improve communication

Incidents are complex. Text-based investigations do not enable adequate communication of incident context or hazard relationships.

Results

The SpaceDraft of the DuPont La Porte facility toxic chemical release incident investigation provides a simple and effective animation that demonstrates the physical relationship between the 8 key workers involved it the incident and their exposure to deadly methyl mercaptan vapour.

The SpaceDraft condenses over 60 pages of the report into a visual medium supported with key incident data; facilitating improved communication and learning.

The SpaceDraft platform provides a quick-turnaround, cost effective solution to support incident investigations in organisations of all sizes.

Safety use cases

SpaceDraft’s platform supports several high-impact safety use cases including:

  • Job Safety Analysis
    Plan for success.
  • Traffic management
    Communicate plans easily .
  • Task risk assessment
    Animate risk interactions.
  • Workplace design reviews
    Review pre- and post-design changes.
  • Manual handling time and motion studies
    Communicate risk visually.

Step change your safety with SpaceDraft.

Cam Stevens, Pocketknife Group Director of Safety Innovation

SpaceDraft for Safety Planning and Hazard Prevention

Download our Case Study PDF to dig a bit deeper.