Walt Disney’s safety manager to speak at Hazards 29 conference

MIKE Bell, worldwide safety and health manager at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, will deliver the Trevor Kletz Memorial Lecture at IChemE’s Hazards 29 conference in 2019.

His talk, Applying Safety to Unconventional Risks, will discuss how he manages the safety of 74,000 Disney cast members and 50m guests each year. He will explain how he and his teams of safety professionals apply safety principles to a unique and diverse risk portfolio.

Bell has worked for Disney for 18 years leading various teams of safety professionals. He has supported operational areas such as Disney’s Hollywood Studios and provided programmatic support in area such as incident reduction, food safety, and industrial hygiene. He is currently focussed on providing design and construction safety support for the major expansion projects at Walt Disney World. Before joining Disney, Bell worked for BP Amoco, focussing on industrial hygiene leadership and support.

“Those of us working in the safety and health industry are managing the safety of others day-in and day-out and often on such a vast scale,” said Bell. “It’s absolutely critical that we identify the right risk priorities to focus on and work together to find ways to reduce risk for everyone’s benefit. To do this, we must talk about our experiences; sharing what’s worked well, and the challenges we’ve overcome. That is why the Hazards conferences are vital – they keep this dialogue and sharing of expertise at the forefront. I’m delighted to be delivering the Trevor Kletz Memorial Lecture at Hazards 29 to share my experience.”

Trish Kerin, director of the IChemE Safety Centre who will be delivering technical workshops at the event on the safety centre’s interactive case studies, said: “Everything we do in process and chemical engineering is about keeping people safe. Hazards 29 is part of IChemE’s commitment to keep the industry and society safe by promoting good practice and helping businesses to ensure their operations are as safe as possible. I look forward to learning more from Mike in his lecture and all the other process safety lessons that will be shared at Hazards that can be applied across a range of industry sectors.”

The conference will take place on 22–24 May 2019 at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Birmingham, UK. The conference is run in association with the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center. Other plenary speakers at the event will be Dame Judith Hackitt, chair of the manufacturers’ organisation EEF, Mark Neate, executive director of environment, safety, and security at Sellafield, and Tracy Whipple, upstream technical authority for process safety engineering at BP.