Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster
Disaster Studies Risk Management Chemical Engineering Business Ethics Organizational Psychology Safety Engineering Industrial Accidents
“Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster” is the safety-professional’s textbook that turns a catastrophic 2005 refinery explosion into a master-class on why systems fail and how to stop the next tragedy. Written by renowned sociologist-of-safety Andrew Hopkins, this 2013 CCH Australia paperback dissects the 15 deaths, 180 injuries and $1.5-billion loss not as “human error” but as the predictable outcome of organizational blindness, cost-cutting metrics and a culture that ignored warning signs. Readers get a step-by-step forensic narrative—perfect for university courses, incident-investigation teams, HSE managers and board-level risk committees—showing how normal work pressures eroded safety margins and why traditional compliance auditing missed the clues.
What makes this copy especially attractive is its pristine, very-good condition: crisp, unmarked pages, tight spine and no smoke or storage odors, so it arrives classroom-ready and annotation-friendly. At only 318 g it is slim enough for field use, yet packed with case-study detail, flow-charts, timelines and reflective questions that turn the BP story into a reusable template for any high-hazard industry. Engineers, safety officers and MBA students consistently cite this ISBN 9781921322440 edition as the clearest, most readable account of the disaster, and used copies in this clean state are increasingly scarce.
Owning this book means more than adding a classic text to your shelf; it equips you with Hopkins’ proven “learning lens” that links leadership decisions to front-line realities, helping organizations move from blame to sustainable learning culture. Whether you need it for coursework, professional certification, or to benchmark your own facility’s process-safety maturity, this affordable paperback delivers the authoritative analysis that regulators, oil majors and safety consultants quote year after year.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
Buy Now