Accidents regulatory authorities

An important aspect of environmental, health, and safety laws and regulations is enforcement. Eederal, state, and local regulatory authorities usually have large enforcement sections. In the environmental area, compliance audits are usually conducted aimually. OSHA, both federal and state, usually audits based on a faciHty s accident/incident rate. 

HAZOP stands for Hazard and Operability Studies, a set of formal hazard identification and elimination procedures designed to identify hazards to people, processes, plants, and the environment. The techniques aim to stimulate the imagination of designers and operations people in a systematic way so they can identify potential hazards. In effect, HAZOP studies assume that there will be mistakes, and provide a systematic search for these mistakes. In some European countries, HAZOP studies are mandatory and attended by observers from regulatory authorities to ensure that the studies are carried out correctly. The examination of accidents52 during 1988 at a large U.S. chemical company revealed that the accidents could be classified as follows ... 

Notification of nuclear accidents, whether from NPS or other nuclear installations, especially those resulting in the release of radioactivity to the environment, should be immediately notified not only to the national regulatory authorities, but also to the international advisory authorities such as the IAEA, NEA, OECD, etc. This will enable those countries likely to be affected by the activity released to take appropriate countermeasures so as to reduce the consequences of such an event. 

At subsystem and competent level, the areas to concentrate on include display appearance, indication of status, symbology, colour palette, menu structure, menu depth and menu complexity. In some instances, the regulatory authorities enforce standardisation via Technical Standard Orders (TSO). The Aerofiot-Nord 737 example below shows an avoidable accident if ETSO-C4c was adopted universally. 

According to the rules laid down by the national nuclear regulatory authority (see, for example, Ret [11]), the consequences of a DBA should never result in any population exposure that would require countermeasures to protect people in the early period of the radiation accident. 

In this case study, an accident is analysed from the perspective both of the airline, and of the regulatory authority. Information from the investigation is put into the form required by the Theory of Constraints, and it is shown that a few core problems underlie all the undesirable effects observed. These leverage points are addressed, and the resulting few safety recommendations provide the necessary corrective action. 

Thus there is a need to revisit the concept of prudence, and the purpose of the present paper is to provide insights into this concept and its practical use, by linking it to relevant theories and empirical studies, as well as to initiatives taken by regulatory authorities and the oil and gas industry in recent years, e.g. after the Deepwater Horizon accident. 

Whether the owner or the contractor will provide the equipment and material necessary for the job and which of the parties bears the risk if any of that equipment or material causes an accident or results in the issuance of a citation or order by MSHA or state regulatory authority... 

WASH-1400] "An assessment of accident risks in US Commercial Nuclear Power Plants Reactor Safety Study" US Nuclear Regulatory Authority, 1975... 

We have already stated that risk is a combination of accident likelihood (probability) and severity of the consequence. The risk increases with either severity or the probability of the accident as illustrated in Fig. 4.2. Different regulatory authorities use a variety of classification criteria in order to evaluate the acceptability of risk. Some of these are discussed in more detail in Appendix B, but the remainder of this paragraph wiU use the UK MoD criteria to illustrate the basic approach adopted by most. 

The safety/risk criteria. The safety/risk criteria establish the top-level system safety requirements, or objectives. Regulatory authorities may have different definitions for the various categories of hazards/accidents. To be able objectively to distinguish and evaluate the various hazards present, it is important to define the exact terminology and to allocate a measure of performance. This is an important (and arguably most neglected) topic as it is the safety acceptance criteria the system is expected to achieve, and hence the measure (or standard) the assessment will compare the system against. For more detail on safety criteria, see Appendix B. The system level. Define the systems level at which safety is to be assessed. The importance of this step is explained in Section 8.3 above. A safety assessment by a supplier of a component (e.g. a flare dispenser) will vastly differ in scope and approach to a safety assessment for a product (e.g. an aircraft) or user system (e.g. a facility). 

Regulatory authorities, operators and maintainers need to enforce a proactive approach to safety, whereby the safety management system not only ensures that the intended level of safety remains intact, but also that trends are monitored and used to make improvements before an accident or incident occurs. Trends can be monitored via internal programmes such as FRAC AS/DRACAS (see Appendix A) as well as via data-sharing programmes such as Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA), Aviation Safety Action Partnerships (ASAP) and accident databases. 

The broad range of accidents/hazards (see Chapter 6), their associated risks, and the particular circumstances of each potential accident situation means that it may not be practicable to have one single set of criteria covering all contingencies. However, irrespective of which criteria are chosen, they must be substantiated and agreed by the relevant regulatory authority. To measure is to know, but first we need to define the measuring stick. Hence the production of the safety criteria report. The criteria should be formulated so as to provide effective safety measures, be readily understood in terms of both concept and application, and be flexible to provide scope for user contribution. 

A series of eharter bus accidents culminating in a dramatic May 1999 New Orleans erash put the obscure OMC in the public spotlight. Congress responded with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Amendments of 1999, whieh ereated FMCSA, assigned it all of OMC s employees and responsibilities, and provided some additional regulatory authorities, ineluding the power to require operators to install black box event recorders to monitor vehicle speeds and hours of operation. ... 

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