Recently published a paper on adequacy of energy absorbers in Safety Science. Let me know if you are interested in research of fall protection equipment. Email me at y.goh”at”curtin.edu.au (replace the “at” with @).
Adequacy of personal fall arrest energy absorbers
March 29th, 2010Systems thinking in accident analysis
December 15th, 2009I’ve recently published an article on the application of systems thinking concepts in accident analysis. The article is published in Safety Science available via ScienceDirect. The paper includes a discussion on the Bellevue fire in Western Australia.
Anyone interested in the article can contact me via y.goh @ curtin.edu.au (remove the spaces adjacent to “@”)
Accident Alert from Singapore
May 28th, 2009The latest accident alerts from Singapore had been improving in its usefulness. The case studies are relatively prompt and have pictures to help readers understand the cases better. The most recent alert can be found here.
Some possible improvements include providing a set of indexes on the case (like what Chemical Safety Board does for its accident reports) to facilitate classification of the lessons learned. A database should be developed to allow public to search for past cases. Perhaps a forum can be created to allow safety professionals to discuss the cases to derive other useful lessons.
Prosecution damages flight safety
March 29th, 2009Take a look at this: http://aviation-safety.net/news/newsitem.php?id=2134
Interesting doctoral thesis that indicates that criminal actions against pilots or air traffic controllers can be damaging to flight safety as a whole. According to the article, deterence effect of prosecution is minimal and prosecution might even have detrimental effects on flight safety! My take is that it is not possible to remove prosecution totally, but the approach to prosecution should be better thought through to prevent negative effects highlighted in the article.
Fall arrest shock or impact force
March 26th, 2009A lot of people are confused on how to calculate fall arrest shock force… here’s a simple equation to determine the average impact or shock force during fall arrest:
Average impact force, F = mg(h + x) / x
m = mass
g = gravity
h = free fall distance (from initial position to just before deployment of energy absorber or other energy absorbing component)
x = stretch or extension of the fall arrest system during fall arrest
Note that there are lots of assumptions in this equation. The Canadian standards has good information on design of fall arrest systems.