Piper Alpha survivor Steve Rae is spearheading a new consulting venture, which he said came in response to the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The former executive director of Step Change in Safety told Energy Voice that after four years in the role, he decided to slow down and focus on consultancy work in the twilight of his career.
This is where Fortitude – Action Beyond Compliance came from, a consultancy that would allow Rae to work at his own rate, even if demand has been higher than he expected.
© Supplied by DCT Media/Jim IrvineHowever, the firm started when his wife, Maryann Rae, an HSE professional, was asked to work in response to the Grenfell Tower fires that claimed the lives of 72 people.
“The story behind the formation of action beyond compliance is pretty intense,” Rae told Energy Voice.
“When she [Maryann] was going consulting, she had been offered a position working on the follow up or the fallout from Grenfell.
“Maryann’s background is in health and safety, she didn’t work in the oil business for a long time, and she was going in to do some safety cultural assessments for building sector because they were about to take in safety cases for high-rise buildings as a result of the Grenfell tragedy.”
In 2017 a fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London.
In addition to those who died in the blaze, 70 people were injured as 223 people escaped.
Following the disaster, questions were asked about building safety regulations. Then housing minister Michael Gove told parliament in 2023 that the British government was partly to blame for the incident.
He said that regulations were “so faulty and ambiguous that it allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system in a way that led to tragedy.”
This led to the work Maryann Rae took on that formed the couple’s latest venture.
“So she was working as a consultant,” he explained, “but she needed a vehicle to work through, so we said we’d create a company.”
Fortitude – Action Beyond Compliance, the story behind the name
Why pick the name Fortitude – Action Beyond Compliance? For Steve and Maryann Rae this was not a decision that was taken lightly, and they can justify every word in the firm’s title.
Maryann came up with the name ‘Fortitude’, telling Steve that she had settled on it “because fortitude means courageous”.
Rae added: “The action beyond compliance was a pretty interesting discussion for Maryann and I because we both felt that if you set a business up to be compliant, most of the time you might meet that but some of the time you really struggle.
“If you really want to reach compliance, you have to reach beyond compliance, and especially in the safety sector.
“It just became obvious that it should be Action Beyond Compliance because that’s what we both believed in.”
© Supplied by DCT Media/Kami ThomsHaving survived the explosion on the Piper Alpha platform over 36 years ago, Rae has dedicated his working life to educating businesses and workers on how to prevent the disaster that killed 167 men from happening again.
Rae has taken to public speaking to share his story, both before and after 7 July 1988, explaining how he found himself on board the Piper Alpha, what led to the explosion and how it impacted him.
He said: “Compliance isn’t good enough because you’ll always just falter, but if you aim beyond compliance, typically you’ll be in a great place.”
Fortitude, ‘It’ll be about what I enjoy doing’
Last year Rae stepped down from his role at Step Change in Safety to focus on less demanding work that he could regulate, which led to him picking up consultancy jobs under the Fortitude banner.
He explained: “I decided I was going to step down from Step Change in Safety because I wanted a better quality of life.
“I was just too busy and I was doing things that I didn’t think motivated me, running a company is a big deal.”
© Supplied by Ryan DuffRae added that “looking after staff and P&L [profit and loss]” were not things that he “wanted to spend the last years of my working life on.”
Rae stepped down in what he described as a “controlled manner,” giving the Step Change in Safety board time to find a replacement.
He said that his work with Fortitude will focus on “what I felt I wanted to do”.
Rae added: “It’ll be about what I enjoy doing, which is storytelling, safety leadership, influencing and all the rest of it.”
‘I wouldn’t say I feel retired’
Although he has stepped away from full-time employment, Steve Rae commented: “Wouldn’t say I feel retired.”
He added: “I feel comfortable doing what I’m doing. I’ve still got plenty of time in the week to do things I choose to be, but what it has done is it’s allowed me to do what I feel, at this stage in my career, I want to do.”
Since he started consultancy work, Steve Rae has worked with international firms as well as some that are on his doorstep in Aberdeen.
However, jet setting “was never going to be the intention,” he explained.
“The intention would be to step into an organisation, spend a couple of hours or a day with them, step out. But now I’m travelling for the day, getting there for a day, travelling back for a day. But if that’s the model that works for my clients, that’s what I do.”
© Supplied by Fortitude - Action BTrying to keep to the part-time schedule that he has set himself is something that requires management, as Rae explained, “I could be super busy.”
“I am genuinely trying to have what I would call a transition out of working life into retirement and I think my experience in Piper and post-Piper will be something it’s difficult to leave alone.
“Because, if people ask me for help or they want specific coaching or assistance, it’s difficult not to do that.”
He said the reasoning for that is after surviving the Piper Alpha disaster he was “fortunate to be still around to give something back”.
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