Accidents Will Not Happen

But you didn t read that line, or the next, or the next. So you are a danger to yourself and everyone else. Read and take notes on any experiment before you come to lab (see Chapter 2, Keeping a Notebook ). 

What you don t know can hurt you. If you are not sure about any operation, or you have any question about handling anything, please ask your instructor before you go on. Get rid of the notion that asking questions will make you look foolish. Following this safety rule may be the most difficult of all. Grow up. Be responsible for yourself and your own education. 

Blue Cross or Blue Shield Find out how you would get medical help, if you needed it. Sometimes during a summer session, the school infirmary is closed and you would have to be transported to the nearest hospital. 

These are a few of the safety guidelines for an organic chemistry laboratory. You may have others particular to your own situation. 

That s an attitude you might hold while working in the laboratory. You are NOT going to do anything, or get anything done to you, that will require medical attention. If you do get cut, and the cut is not serious, wash the area with water. If there s serious bleeding, apply direct pressure with a clean, preferably sterile, dressing. For a minor bum, let cold water run over the burned area. For chemical bums to the eyes or skin, flush the area with lots of water. In every case, get to a physician if at all possible. 

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This book is guidance. It should not be treated as a complete and authoritative statement of the law. It is intended to help teachers steer their way through what we believe are the key issues and responsibilities regarding the implementation of health and safety requirements in the classroom. We have deliberately used simple terms to help readers understand some aspects of the law and how it can impact on classroom practice. The exemplar materials illustrated reflect authors experience of good practice in a variety of contexts. Teaching and learning in the primary school is such a dynamic and unpredictable experience that no one can guarantee that accidents will not happen. We hope this will help readers to do all that is reasonable ... 

Everyone who is involved with efforts to improve safety just knows that learning should be based on accidents, on things that have gone wrong. Accidents are accepted as opportunities to learn, specifically to find out what should be done to make sure that the same - or a similar - accident will not happen again. Since accident investigations often are limited by time and resources, there is a tendency to look at the accidents that have serious consequences and leave the rest to be dealt with later... 

To get information is one of the chief purposes of hearings it does not follow that the committee should necessarily expose itself to the time-consuming process of acquiring information through indiscriminate volunteering on the part of whatever citizens choose to present themselves. Only by accident will it happen that the men best qualified to inform will be in attendance. 

Many accidents involve experienced employees, and planned safety observations can detect the reasons. Some workers who have been doing a job for many years will often develop short-cuts and effort-saving practices that are hazardous. Because accidents have not happened before, they will insist that the short-cuts are safe. 

The common view is that an accident must involve some form of injury. This is not correct and is counter-productive. The focus on injury or outcome probably resulted from om over-dependence on the Lost-Time Injury (LTl) as a performance indicator. Regrettably, the mindset is well entrenched and the paradigm shift needed to redress the present thinking will not happen imtil we replace our dependence on the LH with alternative performance indicators which are understood, accepted and relevant to industry needs. 

Health and safety differs from many areas measured by managers because improvement in performance means fewer outcomes from the measure (injuries or ill-health) rather than more. A low injury or ill-health rate trend over years is still no guarantee that risks are being controlled and that incidents will not happen in the future. This is particularly true in organizations where major hazards are present but there is a low probability of accidents. 

The corporate chief engineer should manage the accident reporting system for the entire company. If accident investigation does not get the priority and visibility needed, it will be ineffectual, and there will be no way to ensure that the accident (or one like it) will not happen again. 

Reporting electrical shocks as with reporting any accident must have positive consequences or it will not happen. In other words, your people must believe that they will benefit from each report. YOUR actions, not your words, are important. 

Having an emergency plan will not mean that a disaster will not happen, but with a plan in place, the chances of an accident becoming a disaster are greatly diminished. An emergency plan should be constantly reevaluated and updated to ensure that changing conditions and personnel are taken into account. An obsolete plan is little better than no plan at all. 

Risk iuialysis of accidents serves a dual purpose. It estimates tlie probability tliat iui accident will occur and also assesses the severity of the consequences of an accident. Consequences may include dmnage to tlie surrounding enviromnent, financial loss, injury to life and/or deatli. This Part of the book (Part IV) is primarily concerned witli tlie metliods used to identify liazards and causes and consequences of accidents. Issues dealing witli healtli risks have been explored in die previous Part (III). Risk assessment of accidents provides an effective way to help ensure eidier diat a mishap will not occur or reduces the likelihood of an accident. The result of die risk assessment also allows concerned parties to take precautions to prevent an accident before it happens. 

A key question here is whether the actual conditions of use will be those that are specified in the exposure scenario. For industrial uses of chemicals, where people have access to safety data sheets and are governed by health and safety and pollution control legislation, there is some hope that people will use the chemical in the way that the exposure scenario envisages. Even here, however, there are bound to be departures from the exposure scenario conditions people will not always wear protective equipment, or follow instructions, and accidents are bound to happen. Consumers, on the other hand, will usually not even know what chemicals a product contains, let alone have access to the details of the exposure scenario. Even if they had, there is no way that their following it and acting in the way it envisages could be enforced. There are therefore major uncertainties as to whether the exposure estimates derived from the exposure scenarios really represent the actual exposure of people and the environment to a chemical. 

Due to variations in equipment, controllers, and designs, what you see on your system will probably not be what you see in this book. You will have to accommodate and respond accordingly. In addition, re-read Sec. 7.1 and be sure you understand how accidents (disasters) can happen and how they can be avoided. That knowledge in itself will be the first major step to successful vacuum practice. 

The very important irreversibility of all observable processes can be fitted into the picture in the following way. The period of time in which we live happens to be a period in which the //-function of the part of the world accessible to observation decreases. This coincidence is really not an accident, since the existence and the functioning of our organisms, as they are now, would not be possible in any other period. To try to explain this coincidence by any kind of probability considerations will, in my opinion, necessarily fail. The expectation that the irreversible behavior will not stop suddenly is in harmony with the mechanical foundations of the kinetic theory. 

In 1997 there was an urgent phone call from a chemical works to the ambulance service. There had been an accident in the laboratory at the works. A flask had broken and the solution of phenol it contained had sprayed out onto the forearm of the worker. It was not much, but it was enough. The worker was, of course, not wearing goggles, nor a laboratory coat. Come on, it was summer - it was hot Tee-shirts were the order of the day. Anyway, it will never happen to me . 

The specific details of how MIC escaped from Tank E-610 at the UCIL plant in Bhopal have been described in detail elsewhere (Varadarajan et al, 1985 Varma, 1986 Varma and Varma, 2005). It is highly unlikely that an accident will repeat itself in exactly the same way it did in Bhopal on December 2-3, 1984. On the other hand, a brief description of the Bhopal episode is relevant to speculate how such accidents can occur and what needs be done to ensure that they do not happen elsewhere. 

This mixture was normally allowed to sit in the tank overnight to allow the chemical reaction to proceed slowly (the carbon disulphide will react with the hydrazine and sodium hydroxide to produce sodium sulphide. The concentrated hydrochloric acid is then slowly added to the tank the next day to produce hydrogen sulphide gas which is ventilated through an overhead pipe). The exact details of what happened on the day of the accident are not clear but the victim recalled pouring the acid into the tank very quickly, thus liberating a large amount of hydrogen sulphide very rapidly. 

Although accidents are just one of the ways in which we construct safety on sites, they help create a shared acceptance of a reality in which accidents will happen. It is in this reality where safety improvements are sought. But this is not a context which readily supports a shift to a safer industry. Indeed, an inherent fatalism has often been identified within industrial workforces which can play havoc with organisational safety targets, particularly those around zero - currently the biggest number in construction site safety- and one which is explored in much more detail in Chapter 8. 

Specters bear accidents A philosopher once said, All the possible things will happen . Therefore, if specters are not eliminated in time, the accidents will happen. 

Benefits melt accidents Economic losses brought by coalmine safety accidents usually will not be a small number of amounts. In order to pursue the maximum benefits, the frequency of accidents happened needs to be reduced. 

The instructor should place Overhead 3 on the overhead projector and explain that accidents happen because of unsafe acts and conditions. If employees permit unsafe acts and unsafe conditions to exist, the first domino will fall. All of the dominoes will fall in sequence and cause an accident harm is the ultimate result. The instructor should focus on the fact that if the unsafe acts and unsafe conditions are stopped, then the dominoes will not fall. 

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