Archive for the ‘Incidents’ Category

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Accident Alert from Singapore

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

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.

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Personal vs. catastrophic accidents

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

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.

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Sydney Scaffold Collapse

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Saw a post on Kevin Jone’s SafetAtWork blog (see my blog roll) on an accident involving a scaffold collapse. 

The accident is reported in this website. Note that there had been a scaffold incident just weeks before this accident.

The victim did not put on his harness, the other painter that did survived. Based on the report, it seems like a scaffold connection failed… fall arrest system harnesses is a last line of the defence that should never be neglected.

Apparrently the painter that survived was hanging on the harness for about 45 minutes, luckily he was able to stand on a window ledge, if not suspension trauma could have set in.

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Posted in Fall Protection, Incidents, Industry, Safety Technology/Hazard, construction | No Comments »

Informed culture = Safety culture

Monday, January 12th, 2009

James Reason (Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents) argues that an informed culture is a safety culture. Reason feels that an informed culture is one where the management is fully informed on the system that they are managing. However is it possible for managers to be fully informed of the hazards and status of the system?

One basic ingredient for this to be possible is for the organisations to have a well-designed safety knowledge management system that captures safety-related information, and codify them so that they can be retrieved when necessary. Once retrieved it is then important for these past information to be adapted by the users for application… this process can be modelled based on the case-based reasoning process, which basically emulate how humans recall past experiences and reuse them in new situations.

I did some work in this area, but only at preliminary prototype stage. We developed a conceptual framework that enables incident cases and past risk assessment to be reused during new risk assessment. Hopefully there will be opportunities to implement them in actual situations.

For those interested see this book for an introduction to case-based reasoning: Applying Case-Based Reasoning: Techniques for Enterprise Systems (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)

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Posted in Incidents, OSH Management, Risk Assessment, Safety Culture, learning organisation | 2 Comments »

Singapore Flyer Stopped 3 Times Before

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Straits Times reported that the Singapore Flyer (a larger version of the London Eye) which stopped about 3 weeks ago, had similar incidents before. The previous incidents were relatively minor as compare to the Dec 23 08 incident, where 173 passengers were stuck in the wheel for more than 6 hours.

Incidents like this would have similar organisational factors and cultural issues as in Columbia Space Shuttle incident (see my last post). Being one of the major tourist attractions of Singapore and the fact that there are lots of media and public attention on the flyer, it is not surprising that the organisation is under pressure to push the flyer to function as plan… I hope the on-going inquiry will look into these organisational and cultural issues.

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