From Chemical Incident Recommendations to Actionable Safety Practices: A Pilot Coding Framework Applied to Three U.S. Chemical Safety Board Investigations

This methodological pilot develops a traceable coding framework for translating U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) recommendations into actionable safety practices while recording the obligation status separately. The framework was applied to 21 recommendations from three purposely selected investigations: Aghorn Operating, Bio-Lab Lake Charles, and Cuisine Solutions.

Each recommendation was linked to its event scenario, control deficit, safety functions, safety issue categories, hierarchy or institutional action level, derived practice, and proposed verification evidence. Fifteen recommendations were company-directed, and six addressed regulators or standards organizations. Derived outputs comprised ten CSB-recommended voluntary practices, four voluntary practices with regulatory components, three institutional communication or policy actions, two proposed consensus-standard revisions, one proposed regulatory requirement, and one binding requirement with an explicit applicability condition.