Investigations and RCA Best Practices Roundtable Session at the 2025 TapRooT® Summit

Anyone trained in TapRooT® RCA has three incredibly strong reasons to attend the Investigations and RCA Best Practices Roundtable Global TapRooT® Summit session.

The first reason is Brian Tink.

Brian specialized in health, safety, and environmental matters during the latter part of his career at Hydro One. Before pursuing other interests, he held the title of Manager of Health, Safety & Environment Field Support for Hydro One Networks, Inc. This branch of Hydro One delivers electrical service to homes and businesses across the province of Ontario, Canada. Hydro One owns over 90,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines and serves 1.3 million customers with 4,600 regular employees. In this position, while reporting to the VP of HSE, he was called to analyze and investigate safety incidents that occurred. He has facilitated or participated in the action plan development for numerous investigations, approximately 30-40 per year since 2000. The position involved working with and reviewing incident reports and action plans with other Line of Business VPs and Directors. The lines of business included Construction, Lines, Station Maintenance, and Forestry type work activities. He has also been called to lead or participate in investigations where a high level of scrutiny is expected for the results or there is a significant need to identify areas of improvement. During his career, he had the opportunity to attend an extensive amount of training and seminars. The training resulted in becoming a Certified Registered Safety Professional in Canada and a Certified Utility Safety Administrator through the National Safety Council in the USA. Both of these certifications require safety management theoretical knowledge, testing, and several years of safety management experience.

Brian has honed his TapRooT® RCA skills over the years and has multiple best practices to share to help all TapRooT® RCA users up their game. Brian’s knowledge and ideas will make you look good as you incorporate them into your repertoire.

The second reason is Pat Fortune.

Pat is an experienced Investigations Specialist with a demonstrated successful history of work in the oil and gas, market pulp, power generation, and mining industries. Patrick is skilled in Workplace Safety, Safety Management Systems, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and Upstream and Downstream Oil and Gas. As a certified TapRooT® Instructor, Patrick combines instructing and facilitating significant incident RCA when opportunities arise, a natural outflow from his years in helping steward oil and gas majors to adopt and implement TapRooT® for significant incident investigation and RCA.

Pat’s experience using TapRooT® RCA has created opportunities to find and develop multiple best practices. He will pass them along during our session. If you believe in saving time and effort, Pat will help you!

And last, but certainly not least by a long shot, is the third reason to attend, Joel Solomon.

Joel is a seasoned petroleum refining professional with over 37 years of experience in the industry. As the former Process Safety Management Coordinator for Marathon Petroleum (Michigan Refining Division), he also served as their Responsible Care Coordinator and was a trained auditor under the RC-1401 standard. While at Marathon, Joel facilitated Process Hazard Analyses (PHAs), and led incident investigations. Joel has been a certified TapRooT® instructor since 2002, and in 2015 he developed the What-If Analysis course for System Improvements. He is a First Class Stationary Engineer in both the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. Active in his community, he is a longtime public safety commissioner and chairs the Wayne County Local Emergency Preparedness Committee.

During the roundtable discussion, these three experts will share the best practices they’ve developed over their impressive careers. They will also answer audience questions. I will also ask the audience if they have ideas to expand on the topics discussed so everyone will benefit from the vast knowledge in the room.

I’m incredibly excited about this session! Join us at the TapRooT® Summit in Knoxville, Tennessee, October 1 – 3, 2025, (Pre-Summit Courses, September 29-30, 2025).