Underreporting is one thing, and everyone knows most Chevron HES metrics are blatant lies (nudge, wink). 1000 bbl oil spills offshore or into a decent sized river are usually gone by tomorrow morning, but you just can't hide bodies like you used to do in the good ol’ days, can you?
In Indonesia a guy fell into a very hot oily water tank, climbed out by himself (where was the buddy system, folks?), and was discovered washing himself off at a emergency shower. After suffering for days in a Jakarta hospital with 2nd degree burns over 90% of his body, he passed away. What a way to go (The Chevron Way?). Another two guys at EGTL in Nigeria (boy, that project is snake bit, isn't it? No pun intended...) responded to a container fire, killing one and sending the other to the hospital in Warri, again with severe burns over most of his body (where was the emergency response team, training, and proper fire fighting equipment folks?). After a few hellish days in the hospital he become #3.
I suppose if you can't lay them off, you can always burn them off the payroll...
Where will it happen next? I’m not sure, but if I were a betting person (which I’m not), I would look to those OPCOs and BUs that have been slowly rebaked according to the following recipe: relatively new 40-something President or MD with no real experience; have transferred, laid off, or outright fired anyone with both experience and the willingness to speak up; top field personnel have retired or simply quit out of frustration or to chase a better paycheck elsewhere; more personnel working in the office than in the field; more Process Advisors than Production Engineers; field personnel who have less than 1.5 hours a day to do their actual job because the rest of the day is spent on their computers or in meetings supporting the Process Advisors; multiple functions doing parallel work; droves of contractors building IT tools for Processes that are outdated and never used by the time they go live; basic decisions that used to simply require a signature from someone in upper management, but are now required to be run as “projects”; people at the top that are so far removed from the, the,… Oh, wait. I didn’t really narrow the field down very much, did I? Oh, well, as I said, I’m not a betting person.
So, the question remains: where will it happen next? Look at the underreporting in your own BUs for the answer to that. To give one recent example, in one of the larger Chevron offshore operations outside of the US (unnamed, I’ll name names when, not if, the next fatalities occur), a guy got his leg caught in a tag line during a crane lift, and was yanked off the deck by his leg. After a few minutes, someone discovered him dangling there 8 feet in the air, in obvious pain. He languished in a hospital for several days, receiving the minimum OTC pain medication because the folks in the BU head office were debating over whether to call it a DAFW (some in mgmt wanted it to be classified it as a First Aid Case, which limits pain medication dosage levels, even though the guy was flown via helicopter medivac to shore). As the company did not authorize appropriate treatment at the time, the skin on his leg where the rope abrasions were began dying and rotting off. He will now require grafts and months of rehab to recover the use of his leg, all because the BU Mgmt did not want to hurt their metrics, or their bonuses (where was the due diligence of the doctors and hospital staff, folks? I suppose Chevron's considerable [and considerably corrupt] political reach is more powerful than the hypocratic oath).
Oh, well, life is very cheap in some parts of the world, and John and the rest of the executive committee knows full well that shareholders in US energy stocks simply don't give a sh*t about a few disposable third world contractors. If they did, they wouldn’t have invested their money in Chevron in the first place (every Democrat and treehugger out there knows all about Ecuador). Just keep that share price up and the dividends rolling in, and, like Bob said, “Every little thing…. is gonna be alright”….