Posts Tagged ‘safety’

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.

Fire classifications

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Wikipedia has an article on fire extinguisher (click here). However, they did not describe the fire classifications for different countries. In Australia, based on AS 2444-2001 Portable fire extinguishers and fire blankets – selection and location, the fire classifications are below:

  • Class A – fires involving carbonaceous solids
  • Class B – fires involving flammable and combustible liquids
  • Class C – fires involving flammable gases
  • Class D – fires involving combustible metals
  • Class E – fires involving energized electrical equipment
  • Class F – fires involving cooking oil and fats

Note that these are fire classifications and not fire extinguisher classifications.

Applying six sigma and systems thinking concepts in safety management

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Six sigma is a systematic approach to improvement. See here for some introduction. One of the basic models used in six sigma improvement projects is DMAIC model: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control. This basic model can be easily applied to safety management.

In the context of safety management, the organisation need to DEFINE what safety problem they are trying to tackle. This could be a unsafe behaviour that the organisation is trying to minimise. Then the organisation need to MEASURE the safety problem to understand the issue at hand thoroughly. This could involve observation of operators, or collecting samples of inspection records. The data collected must then be ANALYSED to identify the underlying causes. The team can also create time series plots (in systems thinking terms, this are the “behaviour over time plot”) of the key parameters and understand the qualitative relationship between the parameters. This might lead on to a causal loop diagram (one of the tools used in systems thinking) being drawn.

Subsequently, solutions must be identified and then implemented to IMPROVE the situation. Whatever solution implemented must then be monitored to ensure that they are effective in CONTROLling the safety problems that the project is meant to reduce. This might involve the use of control charts or perhaps further observations.

Impact force calculation

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

Check out this calculator of impact force.

It is good to show people, using numbers, how a 100kg person falling 4 m onto a 2m lanyard (assume 10% elongation) can result in an impact force of 19.6kN. That’s about 20 100kg persons jumping onto you! If we make reference to EN standard, the maximum impact force should not exceed 6kN.

Also found this link on rock climbing shock force and fall factor calculation.