Micah Backlund, H&P: Shift in safety requires empowering frontline workers

By Stephen Whitfield, Senior Editor

When asked to name a key turning point in his career in the oil and gas industry, one date came immediately to Micah Backlund’s mind.

It was 23 March 2005, the day that a hydrocarbon vapor cloud ignited and exploded at an oil refinery in Texas City, located about 40 miles southeast of Houston. Mr Backlund was driving to his night classes at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where he was pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in industrial hygiene and safety. He could see the plume of smoke from the freeway. The incident would later be used as a case study in both oil and gas and process safety for his class.

Mr Backlund had already been in the industry for a number of years before that. By that day in 2005, he already knew that he wanted to have a career in HSE, yet it was that experience witnessing the explosion and the impact that it had on the people involved that not only crystallized this career path but also his outlook on safety culture.

“There are a number of precursors that lead to major catastrophic events,” Mr Backlund said. “Very rarely do those events occur off a single accident. It’s most commonly a series of dominoes that have to fail in succession in order to have this sort of catastrophic failure. Focusing on the precursors is the only real way to prevent those types of events. You have to identify them early, call them out and address them.”

Mr Backlund has spent the past 17 years in different HSE roles at H&P. He was named HSE Manager for West Texas and California in 2013, seven years after joining the company. He then took on roles as US Land HSE Manager and HSE Director – Americas before assuming a new role as VP – Global QHSE at H&P in March this year, overseeing a team of professionals supporting H&P’s global rig fleet. During his time at H&P, he has seen the industry shift from an outcome-based, top-down culture to a more proactive and frontline worker-focused approach.

Transparency and constant communication are critical to enabling this shift, he noted. For HSE professionals, this means being deliberate about collaboration in their day-to-day work. This can be achieved by frequent visits to rig sites, consulting with superintendents and rig managers, and encouraging all personnel to bring up any exposures that could lead to a serious injury or fatality (SIF) .

“Our focus here is decentralizing decision making and, ultimately, empowering people to solve problems that they recognize. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realize how inefficient and ineffective a top-down approach is. You need to empower good people to make decisions and execute.”

Open communication is also the value Mr Backlund sees in industry organizations such as IADC. He first got involved in the mid-2000s, shortly after joining H&P, through the IADC HSE&T Committee. He began attending committee meetings and the annual HSE&T Conference, seeing the value in networking with peers from different contractors and operators about their approach to safety.

“The one thing I noticed right away is that we have shared experiences and a common understanding about safety,” he said. “When you get into a situation where you might not know a solution, you know somebody else who may have that experience and you’ve already got that relationship where you can pick up the phone and discuss potential solutions together.”

Mr Backlund began his two-year term as Co-Chair of the HSE&T Committee, along with Mike Truitt of Independence Contract Drilling, at the beginning of 2025. In this role, he’s helped kickstart a couple of major initiatives within the committee.

One is a project to establish best practices for casing running operations. In July, the committee held a kickoff meeting where it spoke with service companies and operators about the hazards associated with  casing running operations. Since then, the committee has been working on a document that will incorporate the insights gathered from members. A first draft of the document is expected by the end of 2025.

The committee is also working to draft a standardized definition of SIFs, which currently varies from company to company. This initiative, also expected to finish by year-end, ties into the launch of a tracking system in January for IADC’s Incident Statistics Program (ISP), which now gives users an option to track whether an incident that they report to the ISP is a SIF.

The committee has been using the information gathered from this tracking to better understand what the industry considers a serious injury, Mr Backlund said.

“One of the tangible benefits of IADC is that we have a standard for reporting incidents through the ISP, which allows us to compare our own performance against our peers,” he said. “It gives us a common language that drilling contractors can use when we’re talking to customers. We can reinforce that language when we’re talking about SIFs. We need to take that definition from the same playbook.” DC