Buncefield Stories: Organizational Learning and Remembering for Crisis Prevention

Many investigations find that those who deal with hazardous technologies need to be aware of the potential consequences of their actions to inform their risk decision-making; that is they need a good safety imagination. Safety imagination is not fostered by changes to technical standards and the like but rather requires lessons to be integrated into professional practice. Scholarship on professional learning emphasizes the social nature of learning, including the sharing of stories. This chapter draws on accounts of the Buncefield UK fuel terminal explosion to examine the link between incident investigations and production of stories that are useful for learning to improve safety imagination and so contribute to effective risk management and crisis prevention. Since learning depends on having the right stories to draw on, we also address the implications for incident investigation. We argue that while stories are often overlooked in incident investigations, they link the everyday to the disastrous and are therefore a critical ingredient for safety imagination.