About Us

Randall Patton, Principal and CEO of Command Staff, has more than 35 years of experience in the oil and gas industry having served as a Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) training instructor, a member of the TEEX Industrial Advisory Board, an industrial fire chief and an executive with leadership roles in health, safety and emergency response. Randall has led major independent refining organizations and other service organizations in emergency response, crisis management, process safety, occupational safety and health, industrial hygiene, risk management and operational excellence.

Command Staff was formed with the vision of making this knowledge and experience available to other organizations. Specific to emergency response and crisis management, Randall has led in the development and implementation of enterprise level/corporate response capabilities at both Valero Energy and Holly Frontier (now HF Sinclair). These efforts not only included development and training of operational emergency response teams at the facility level but also the development, training and implementation of corporate level Emergency Operations Centers (EOC) and cross-functional crisis management teams.

Over the course of his career, Randall has served as Incident Commander or participated with incident management teams on several major events including:

• K-Resin explosion and fire – Channel Industries Mutual Aid (CIMA).
• Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike - impacting multiple company assets simultaneously.
• Propane release, fire and explosion resulting in full plant evacuation and shutdown.
• Large refinery crude unit fire.
• Large refinery major crude oil spill.
• BP Macondo spill – outsourced Emergency Operations Center (EOC) IH Sector Coordinator and response unit.
• Refinery heater explosion and fire resulting in employee fatality.

Collectively the experience gained from these and numerous other events have allowed Randall to develop an extensive knowledge and understanding of the criticality and importance of well trained and coordinated emergency response and crisis management resources.