Mastering Tim Tam timing mirrors process safety's critical risk-reward balance. Get it right and you’ll reap rewards.

As the bickie became gooey in my fingers, I knew the moment was now — time to slam that Tim Tam.

A Tim Tam is an Australian bickie — or cookie, to those of you in the U.S. It was created in 1964 by Arnott’s and is an iconic Aussie treat. It consists of two rectangular bickies with a flavored cream filling that is coated in chocolate. A Tim Tam Slam is a unique way to consume the bickie. The steps are as follows:

This 100th episode of "Process Safety With Trish and Traci" examines the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster through the lens of due diligence. Columbia disintegrated during re-entry after foam debris damaged heat shield tiles during launch. The podcast explores how NASA normalized foam strikes over time, turning "lessons of failure into memories of success." Multiple intervention opportunities were missed due to inadequate resources, poor communication, and cultural barriers.

On a sunny summer day in 2007 near Wichita, Kansas, a tanker truck was offloading naphthalene into a stainless-steel tank at a solvent tank farm when the container spontaneously ignited, catching fire and exploding, shooting projectiles in the air. This led to the evacuation of thousands in a nearby community. While there were no casualties, the explosion destroyed the entire storage facility, luckily not causing any injuries or fatalities in the nearby community. An investigation determined that electrostatic charge buildup had caused a spark that ignited a solvent-air mixer in the vapor space in the vessel receiving naphtha from the tanker truck.

In this episode, Traci Purdum, CP's editor-in-chief, reads an article from authors Tom Patnaik and Christian Stentzel -- both of Thaletec. The article was published May 21, 2025.