Deliberately Venting Gas, When Shortcutting Becomes Criminal

Deliberately venting gas to atmosphere as a work method is not a grey area, not a clever workaround, and not a risk trade off. It is a conscious decision to defeat controls, and regulators will treat it as exactly that, deliberate exposure to serious risk.

This is a sharp reminder that safety prosecutions are no longer confined to what systems failed, they are increasingly focused on who chose to ignore them, and why.

What happened

In this matter, a company and an individual worker were both fined after deliberately venting gas as part of a task. This was not an equipment malfunction or an unforeseen release. The gas was intentionally discharged because it was seen as faster, easier, or more convenient than following the established safe process.

That distinction matters. Once intent enters the picture, the legal framing shifts from inadvertent failure to conscious risk creation.

Why regulators care so much about intent

From a WHS perspective, gas hazards sit in the top tier of consequence. Depending on the substance, uncontrolled venting can create explosion risk, asphyxiation risk, toxic exposure, or secondary hazards to adjacent workers and the public.

Regulators are not naïve about operational pressures and they understand production deadlines, maintenance constraints, and the frustration of slow procedures. What they will not tolerate is a deliberate decision to bypass controls that exist precisely because the risk is severe.

In simple terms, this is not about hindsight. It is about choice.

Why both the company and the worker were fined

This is the part many people still struggle with.

The company was fined because it failed to ensure safe systems of work were implemented and enforced. That includes supervision, training, and a culture where unsafe shortcuts are not normalised or quietly accepted.

The worker was fined because workers also have duties. When a person knowingly performs a task in a way that creates serious risk, especially when they understand the hazard, they are no longer just a passive recipient of a poor system. They become an active participant in the risk.

This is not about blaming workers for systemic failures. It is about recognising that deliberate acts sit in a different category to mistakes, slips, or lack of knowledge.

It gets under my skin when people make stupid or dangerous actions and put others at risk.

The safety trap hiding in plain sight

Cases like this usually point to one of two deeper problems.

First, the safe method exists on paper, but it is so impractical, slow, or poorly designed that people routinely work around it. Over time, the workaround becomes the real system.

Second, leadership knows the shortcut happens and quietly tolerates it because nothing bad has happened yet. Until it does.

Neither scenario survives regulatory scrutiny. If the safe method is unusable, that is a design failure. If the shortcut is known and tolerated, that is a leadership failure.

What this means for safety leaders and supervisors

This case is a warning shot for anyone relying on procedures alone.

If your risk controls only work when people are compliant on a good day, they are not controls, they are suggestions.

Gas systems, isolation steps, venting processes, and purge procedures need to be engineered so that the safe way is the easy way, or at least the only way. Where that is not possible, supervision and verification need to be real, not assumed.

It is also time to be honest about where deliberate violations occur. If everyone knows a shortcut exists, the organisation owns that risk whether it is written down or not.

The uncomfortable takeaway...

This prosecution reinforces a line regulators are drawing more clearly every year.

Errors can often be designed out. Violations cannot.

When a worker deliberately vents gas, and an organisation allows that practice to exist, the law will treat it as a conscious gamble with foreseeable harm. That is why fines land on both sides of the fence.

If your operation involves hazardous gases, now is the time to walk the job, not the paperwork. Because when intent replaces accident, the court will not be sympathetic, and neither will the regulator.

Shortcutting risk rarely saves time. It just defers the consequences until they arrive with a brief attached.