The safety industry has an imperative to ask this question about any incident: avoidable or inevitable? This is how ‘lessons learned’ work. In 2012 a fatality occurred in the field during a corrosion monitoring routine exercise to retrieve and replace a corrosion probe. Standard integrity management operations. This incident raised the question for Axess Corrosion in Houston, a business concerned with not only why we monitor but how, and the answer was ‘it was both’. With the technology in the field at that time the incident was inevitable, and with Axess’ experience and innovation, it could become avoidable.