Posts Tagged ‘accident’

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.

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.

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.

Columbia Space Shuttle Accident

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

NASA just released a report titled, “Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report”. The final report is focused on the technical issues involved in the Columbia space shuttle accident in 2003. The report can be downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/news/reports/index.html.

To me, the 2003 investigation report by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board is more interesting… the report can be downloaded from the same website above. The 2003 report covered organisational factors that contributed to the accident. As in most major incident investigation reports, safety culture was highlighted as a key contributor. The investigation board also highlighted the relationship with the Challenger accident. Very interesting insights. Worth reading…

NIOSH Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) Program

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

NIOSH (U.S.) has a Fatality Assessment and Control (FACE) Program that investigates fatal accidents and make the report available on their website. The reports can be quite useful if you want to develop case studies for safety education purpose. Click here for the website.