Roundtable Meeting — June 2-3, 1999

Tape #8:

Dr. Mannan: One thing that we need to be aware of is that any subject we take discussion can go on for quite a bit of time. I am feeling a little anxious to get to where we want to go even though when I started out yesterday morning I said like Yogi Berra we really don’t know where we want to go. But it is time to move on and set the stage for what we want to do. We have used some clichés here to explain where we are. I once saw a proverb in a library that read, "We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge." Well that is what has happened between yesterday and this morning. We have got a lot of information and some of you are feeling the overload of information. As someone said yesterday we need to focus ourselves and get serious. It is time to set aside our differences and set aside our interests on specific issues, whether it is benchmarking, insurance perspective, databases, and get really focused and keep our eye on the goal. That goal is to get somewhere with this meeting. I will use another cliché or another statement by a famous person, Neil Armstrong, he said when he put his first step on the moon, "One small step for man, a giant step for mankind." I will use the same analogy here. Many of us would probably feel that what we accomplished yesterday and what we will accomplish today by the end of the day is probably a small step, but I will tell you that posterity, years from now will probably say that we took a giant leap in addressing how we view chemical safety in this country and overseas and how the goals are set on who does that and where it is done. When we come back from break ­ we need to focus and agree on some goals

As I said, we have information and knowledge, now what do we do about it. Okay now we need to focus. One thing I want to do is agree on some goals. As I said to you in my letter that went out in the invitation, these goals that we agree on, we may not be able to get a consensus, we may not be able to have the final vote, but lets put something in paper. So when you come back from the break, we will itemize specific goals, and go around the table and make sure everyone has an opportunity to put their 2 cents on the table. Let’s get them on paper, and if you come up with more, so be it, but half of the next session is going to be used in putting those goals on the flipcharts. Once we have gotten them on there, the next half will be used to prioritize them. Yes, this sounds scientific, but I think that is better than nothing. The way we will do it is to pass around pieces of paper and we look at the ones on the flip charts and pick the first three that in your minds are the first three priority goals. We will pass the papers back and collate them. It may turn out that the first five or seven are too close to call and we will have to go to a runoff. But ultimately either by the first voting process or by the end of the second, maybe third, we will get to a consensus of the top three goals. Again, we can sit down and discuss whether or not that is the best way to do it, whether or not that is the best way to go and hopefully we will agree. We go to lunch then and the more important people down there who are organizing everything tell me that today’s lunch is a sit-down session, so we don’t want to be late for lunch either, otherwise lunch will get cold. So lets be sure to keep on track and on schedule. When we come back, here is what the breakout groups are going to be like. As you can see I have been doing this "on the fly" from things that I have been hearing from people, so this pretty much happened over yesterday and this morning. We will have three breakout sessions. One is the infrastructure/process breakout session, second is the database session, and third the activities needed to accomplish the goals that we agree on in the general session. Again, there is a method to the madness on how we decide who is going to go in which breakout session. We have some colored cards that we will distribute…

Irv: Sam, describe what you mean by the first session.

Dr. Mannan: I’ll get to those in a minute. We will pass out those cards. There will be some flexibility in moving from one breakout to another if you exchange cards. There will be three facilitators for these breakout sessions. Irene Jones will do one, Jerry Bradshaw will do one, and Tim Gablehouse will do one. We are also going to have a different set of reporters reporting back to the general session from these breakouts. We haven’t decided yet who these reporters are going to be. In answer to your question Irv about what these sessions, particularly the first one, I think that is an important one. We sat around and between 4-5 maybe 10 people we figured out how to do this project. How to pull together this roundtable meeting. What the agenda should be, who should participate. What should be the briefing papers, what topics should be covered in the briefing papers. I think that should be looked at. I think we need to decide that this process we have of either doing this meeting or establishing national chemical safety goals, we shouldn’t leave that up to me or my research staff. This whole committee needs to have input. They need to tell us whether or not we should meet in 6 months maybe two years, who should be in it and how we should do it. The whole thing should be challenged, discussed and some kind of conclusion and consensus reached.

Irv: So the group will be about deciding if there is activities described in the third session, how we will get together and move those activities, internal process, nothing to do process safety.

Dr. Mannan: Yes, nothing to do with process safety. Internal process of how this is happening and whether or not the right people are involved. For example, Bob Barrish mentioned yesterday that there is not representation from 100% of the stakeholders, and that is very true. But are we doing enough to get the right people here? With regard to the databases, we need to remember that they have been looked at in different ways and can be looked at in different way than we can imagine, but what I am looking at there, is once we agree on those goals, we need database activity to support those goals.

Irv: Database and metrics? I think we should put a slash there.

Dr. Mannan: And then finally activities needed to accomplish the goals. That is pretty self-explanatory. For example, are we going to do national centers of excellence or do at-risk facility inspections, are we going to use the insurance perspective? What do we want back from these reporters of the different breakout sessions? We want them to come back with action plans