Avoid making your operators into procedural robots

I was reading an incident report of a ammonia pipeline rupture in the USA. The pipeline ruptured and released a large amount of ammonia. The case study report available in NTSB website indicates that even though the operator was receiving a large amount of alarms indicating a pipeline rupture, he attributed the drop in line pressure to less supply and more delivery. This skewed his troubleshooting abilities. How many of you are ensuring that your plant operators are trained to analyze data from DCS and troubleshoot the problem? There is no better defense than a trained and informed operator and your plant training programs should ensure this. During an emergency an operator cannot refer to procedures and all his training and knowledge will come to the forefront in troubleshooting the problem correctly.