CSB Receives YouTube “Silver Play Button” Award

Yesterday, the Chemical Safety Board announced that it had received a “Silver Play Button” award from YouTube for “having more than 100,000 subscribers for the agency’s YouTube channel @USCSB.”  The CSB’s announcement noted that:

“The CSB’s safety video program is an important tool to enhance public safety, protect workers and communities, and inform the chemical industry of ways to help prevent catastrophic chemical accidents.  The CSB is a small federal agency with a small annual budget, and the agency’s YouTube channel has been an efficient and effective way for the agency to share the many important findings and safety lessons from the CSB’s investigations to a very large audience. The CSB’s safety videos are widely used for safety training throughout the chemical industry and also are increasingly being used in curricula to help educate chemical engineers and safety professionals about chemical hazards.”

CSB Information on West Fertilizer

Long time readers of this blog will understand that I have long been a fan of the investigations conducted by the Chemical Safety Board (CSB). They have provided a valuable service to the chemical process industry and their neighbors by diligently digging in, finding and publicizing the root cause of serious chemical incidents.

The CSB has been a noted innovator in the use of the internet for communicating their findings on these investigations, particularly their use of YouTube videos of recreations of the cause of the accidents they investigate. With the West Fertilizer investigation still in its early stages the CSB has shown us another innovative use of the internet; the use of Facebook.

The use of Facebook by government agencies is certainly not new, but the breadth of the information that the CSB has on their WestExplosion site certainly goes far beyond the standard government Facebook fare. Links to all of the major (and many of the minor) news stories, and their related on-line discussions, about the West Fertilizer explosion make this a one-stop shop for information about this tragedy.

What really impresses me about this page is the lack of agency grandstanding about the investigation. There are bits and pieces about the CSB investigation, but very little of the photo-op spin journalism that we see on too many government web sites.

Good Job.