Reporting accidents

All incidents and accidents resulting in injury or causing illness to employees, and all events (or near-miss accidents), should be reported in order to 

Establish a written record of factors that caused injuries or illnesses or that caused incidents such as near misses that could have possibly have resulted in an injury or illnesses and did not result in bodily harm, property damage, or vehicle damage can be used to establish cause and effect relationships for prevention purposes 

Maintain a capability to promptly investigate incidents and events in order to initiate and support corrective or preventive action 

Provide statistical information for use in analyzing all phases of incidents 

Provide the means for complying with the reporting requirements for occupational injuries and illnesses 

Establish a written record of factors that caused injuries and illnesses or that caused occurrences (near-misses) which might have resulted in injury or illness but did not do this for bodily, property and vehicle damage and occurrences. 

This is required by the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995, which imposes requirements relating to the occurrence of  

These forms can be photocopied for faxing or imaged for e-mailing. 

Statutory records and accident reports must be kept readily available for inspection and retained for a period of at least three years. 

Under the social security legislation all companies with 10 or more employees are required to keep an accident book in which the occurrence of all accidents should be recorded and which must be retained for 3 years after the date of the last entry. Because the original accident book contained personal data about individuals it has been replaced by a new version that is data protection compliant. This new version only must be in use by 1 January 2004. 

Note benefit under the current Social Security Act may be claimed for certain diseases and injuries. These claims are initiated by the claimant but the employer may be required to confirm the circumstances of the incident giving rise to the condition  

Under the social security legislation, the employer is required to have and keep available a copy of Form BI 510, the accident book , for accidents to be noted in if the employee requests it. This book is sometimes used as a convenient means for recording all injuries. 

following an injury-causing accident, it appears likely that the injured person will claim damages, employers may wish to make a claim 

Emergency telephone numbers to be used in the event of fire, accident, flood, or hazardous chemical spillage should be displayed prominently in each laboratory. In addition, the home telephone numbers of laboratory workers and supervisors should be displayed. The appropriate person must be notified promptly in the event of an accident or emergency. 

Every laboratory should have an internal accident-reporting system. This includes provisions for investigating the cause of an injury as well as any potentially serious incident that does not result in injury. The primary aim of such investigations should be to make recommendations to improve safety, not to assign blame for an incident. Local legal regulations may require reporting procedures for accidents or injuries. 

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When reading an accident report, look for the things that are not said. For example, a gland leak on a liquefied flammable gas pump caught fire and caused considerable damage. The report drew atten-... 

Drogaris, G. 1993. Major Accident Reporting System Lessons Learned from Accidents Notified. Elesevier Science Publishers,B.V., Amsterdam. 

The accident reporting procedure should be more than reporting of equipment damage for insurance purposes. The report should show appropriate action taken to prevent a recurrence. 

When I retired from industry one of my first tasks was to sort the many accident reports I had collected. The thickest folder by far was one labeled Preparation For Maintenance. Some of the incidents from that folder, together with more recent ones, are described above. 

The blowdown valves on the boilers were operated by a special key, which had a lug on it so that it could not be removed when the valve was open. It was therefore impossible, in theory, for two blowdown valves to be open at the same time. However, the boiler fitter kept and jealously guarded a private key w ithout a lug and had used this one to open the blowdown valve on the boiler that was under repair. He forgot to tell the process foreman what he had done or to close the valve. The presence of this key would appear to have been of little moment as long as the correct procedure of complete isolation was maintained, but as soon as it was departed from, the additional key became a menace, which eventually enabled the present tragedy to occur, the accident report said. 

Many people s reaction would have been that this is another of those accidents that we can do nothing about, another occasion when "man told to take more care appears on the accident report. 

The fifth reason is that nothing else has the same impact as an accident report. If we read an article that tells us to check modifications, we agree and forget. If we read the reports in Chapter 2, we are more likely to remember. 

If your employers will not let you publish an accident report under your own name, perhaps they will let you send it to a journal that will publish it anonymously, for example, the Loss Prevention Bulletin (see Recommended Reading), or perhaps they will let you publish details of the action you took as a result. This may not have the same impact as the report, but it is a lot better than nothing (see Section 8.1.5). 

For the third edition, I added sections or chapters on heat exchangers, furnaces, inherently safer design, and runaway reactions, and extended many other chapters. Although I have read many accident reports since the first edition appeared, most have merely reinforced the messages of the book, and I added only those incidents that tell us something new. 

A National Transportation Safety Board Railroad Accident Report (1973) describes the accident which occurred in a shunting yard in East St. Louis, Illinois. Arriving cars are classified in the yard, then delivered to outbound carriers. On arrival, cars are inspected. They are then pushed up a mound, uncoupled, and allowed to roll down a descending grade onto one of the classification tracks. This process is called humping. Cars are directed and controlled by a computerized switching and speed-control system. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1971. Highway Accident Report Liquefied Oxygen tank truck explosion followed by fires in Brooklyn, New York, May 30, 1970. NTSB-HAR-71-6. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1972. Railroad Accident Report—Derailment of Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad Company s Train No. 20 with Resultant Fire and Tank Car Ruptures, Crescent City, Illinois, June 21, 1970. NTSB-RAR-72-2. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1973. Highway Accident Report—Propane Tractor-Semitrailer overturn and fire, U.S. Route 501, Lynchburg, Virginia, March 9, 1972. NTSB-HAR-73-3. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1973. Railroad Accident Report—Hazardous materials railroad accident in the Alton and Southern Gateway Yard in East St. Louis, Dlinois, January 22, 1972. NTSB-RAR-73-1. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1979. Pipeline Accident report—Mid-America Pipeline System—Liquefied petroleum gas pipeline rupture and fire, Donnellson, Iowa, August 4, 1978. NTSB-Report NTSB-PAR-79-1. 

National Transportation Safety Board. 1972. Pipeline Accident Report, Phillips Pipe Line Company propane gas explosion, Franklin County, MO, December 9, 1970. National Transportation Safety Board, Washington, DC, Report No. NTSB-PAR-72-1. 

The accident reportedly killed 31 people, injured 299 others, and caused tlic evacuation of 135,000 from the site. The full extent of tlie damage from tliis incident probably will not be known for years. It is tlie long-term effects from exposure to radiation that frighten most people, and tliese fears may still become a horrible reality. 

Management must institute procedures to assess levels of compliance with agreed standards for safety. Techniques include environmental and/or biological monitoring, health surveillance, safety audits, safety inspections, and procedures for accident reporting, investigation and analysis. Communication is essential, e.g. by provision of information (on specific chemicals, processes, etc.), safety meetings, notices, safety bulletins etc. 

Common observation and accident reporte often refer to molecules with these bonds, but especially the first eight in the list. Carbon-metal bonds are to be added to this list, in particular the ones involving transition metals. 

There are only a few accidents reported which involve cobalt and its derivatives. The reason must be because compounds of this metal are hardly ever used. The accidents described are similar to the previously mentioned analogous transition metals. 

There are only a few accidents reported involving this metal and its derivartives. 

Molybdenum sulphide, like any sulphide, reacts violently with oxidants. There was an accident reported describing a molybdenum sulphide/potassium nitrate mixture, which detonated. 

Except with nitric acid, most dangerous reactions are those of alcohols with perchloric acid or its salts (that can form acid). All accidents reported are caused by the formation of highly unstable organic perchlorates. 

Common accidents reported as a result of interaction between metals and halogen derivatives... 

Command post Supervision of all field operations and field teams Maintenance of communications, including emergency lines of communication Recordkeeping, including - Accident reports - Chain-of-custody records - Daily logbooks - Manifest directories and orders - Personnel training records - Site inventories... 

Source After Zalosh, R.G. and Short T.P., Compilation and Analysis of Hydrogen Accident Reports, COO-4442-4, Factory Mutual Research Corp., Norwood, OH, 1978. 

Identify the initiation, propagation, and termination steps for the following accident reports.14 Suggest ways to prevent and contain the accidents. 

What facts should a near-miss accident report include Compare your answer to CCPS s (1992, p. 240). 

Most factors affecting inherent safety are quite straightforward to estimate since they are e.g. based on the physical and chemical properties of the compounds present. An inherently safe process structure is not possible to define by explicit rules, but one has to rely on standards, recommendations and accident reports. This information is based on the experience gained in the operation practice of different processes (Lees, 1996). For example accident reports, which are made after accidents, give valuable information of the possible weaknesses in the different process solutions. Also extensive databases have been collected from accident reports (Anon, 1996). From this data a database of good and bad designs can be collected. 

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