I’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 “@”)
The 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.
Take 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.
A 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.
Safet at work blog (a very useful and active safety blog) reported a list of recent BHP fatalities. One quick observation of the BHP fatalities is that they are primarily personal accidents, not catastrophic accidents (e.g. Beaconsfield rock fall fatality).
A recent special issue of Safety Science (Vol. 47) discusses the confusion about process safety indicators and personal safety indicators. I think some of the discussions are relevant to the mining industry or other geotechnical industry (e.g. construction of tunnels). Process safety indicators are essentially major hazard indicators, which may not correlate with personal safety indicators (e.g. LTI, MTI). In Beaconsfield there appears to be a lack of attention on major hazard indicators. There were rock falls in October 2005, March 2006 and days before the day of the accident (26 April 2006), but the response appears to be inadequate.
One possibility is to require mines to report such major hazard indicators to relevant safety regulators (e.g. Workplace Standards Tasmania) periodically so that the mines will pay more attention to these indicators and the regulators can step in when necessary.