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Trevor Kletz Legacy

Discover the impactful work of Trevor Kletz, a chemical engineer and safety expert whose pioneering ideas in process safety and “inherently safer design” reshaped industrial safety practices worldwide.By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-04-23 · 6-minute read

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Trevor Kletz

Historical

Oct 23, 1922

Oct 31, 2013

Trevor Kletz was a chemical engineer from Great Britain who contributed immensely as a pioneer to the process safety discipline and how the industry avoids accidents. Kletz, born in 1922, was born in Darlington, England, to Russian-Jewish parents. Kletz began university studying chemistry at the University of Liverpool, graduating in 1944. He went to work for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), where he served for nearly forty years. Kletz began his career at the company as a research chemist before switching to chemical engineering and rising to oversee several chemical processing facilities. However, his enduring legacy would be in the field of safety engineering and, more significantly, in creating a safety culture at ICI and championing ideas that transformed process safety internationally. In 1968, Kletz joined ICI and became the company’s first technical safety advisor. Here, he started preaching the need for a systematic approach to safety, which he supported on lessons learned from past accidents and management systems. He also contributed to the formation of Hazard and Operability Studies (HAZOP) and is regarded as the founder of the ‘inherent safety’ approach, which states that processes should be constructed so that risks are minimized or controlled instead of barriers used to mitigate risks. Kletz retired from this post in 1982 and then embarked on a new career as an author and lecturer, specializing in process safety. Two of his books are What Went Wrong? and Learning from Accidents, both regarded as classics in the field. He succumbed to death in 2013, but his work still impacts the chemical engineering profession.

Life and achievements

Early life

Trevor Kletz was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on October 23, 1922, in Darlington, England. Since childhood, Kletz wanted to study chemistry; this desire was further encouraged when his uncle bought him a chemistry set at the tender age of eleven. As a young boy, he had always been interested in science; this saw him join the University of Liverpool to study chemistry, and he graduated in 1944. He chose to work at ICI, one of the biggest chemical companies globally; he first worked as a research chemist. Even though Kletz never went through a chemical engineering education, he gradually found himself solving engineering problems at ICI, which slowly led him to process engineering, the field where he would make most of his impacts. Early in his career, Kletz got practical experience operating several chemical plants, such as iso-octane, acetone, and tar acids. Such experiences gave him a sense of the difficulties and risks involved in chemical manufacturing. This approach to complex problem-solving resulted from close interaction with plant operators, where Kletz learned how to apply safety, efficiency, and good communication to solving plant problems. In the formative years, he provided the foundation for his subsequent pioneering work in process safety, especially his approach to avoiding accidents through design.

Legacy

Trevor Kletz is now known as the father of inherent safety, a concept that forms the basis of industrial safety. His conviction that the level of safety in plants depends on the number of hazards introduced a new idea regarding safety among chemical engineers. Unlike most of his contemporaries who recommended superimposing multiple layers of safety measures on existing designs, Kletz encouraged practitioners to redesign processes to reduce or remove hazards from the processes in the first place. This approach, now called inherent safety, has been embraced by various industries worldwide and is one of the most essential principles of safety management today. The field of chemical engineering benefitted from Kletz’s work, but his ideas also touched on other areas, such as industrial safety, risk management, and safety culture. He has contributed through his work on HAZOP, a method used to assess the dangers inherent in processes. His advocacy on using accidents to learn instead of explaining them as due to human error has also transformed how organizations investigate and act on mishaps. Kletz’s books and lectures have taught generations of engineers and safety professionals, and his ideas are still taught in universities and applied in industries worldwide. He passed away in 2013, but his work in process safety will remain relevant for many more years.

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Trevor Kletz Legacy

By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-04-23 · 6-minute read

Quiet tools, not a toolbar.

Trevor Kletz

Oct 23, 1922

Oct 31, 2013

Life and achievements

Early life

Legacy

More legacies to read

Trevor Kletz

Oct 23, 1922

Oct 31, 2013

Life and achievements

Early life

Legacy

More legacies to read