Heinrichs Dominos Concept

Heinrich suggested that an accident/incident sequence was composed of five components. These components are 

Ancestry and social environment were of the idea that recklessness, stubbornness, avariciousness, and other undesirable traits of character may be passed along through inheritance. In addition, the environment may develop undesirable traits of character or may interfere with education and training. Both inheritance and environment cause faults of the person. 

Faults of the person are due to inherited or acquired faults such as recklessness, violent temper, nervousness, excitability, inconsiderateness, ignorance of safe practices, etc., and constitute proximate reasons for committing unsafe acts or for the existence of mechanical or physical hazards. 

Accident events such as falls of persons, striking of persons by flying objects, etc., are typical accidents/incidents that can cause injuries. Injuries are fractures, lacerations, etc. that result directly from accidents/incidents. 

As can be seen this places the onus almost entirely upon the worker or person to prevent an accident/incident and its resulting injury. 

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In the safety literature over many years, right up to the present, the predominant causation concept applied by safety professionals derives from the writings of H. W. Heinrich. His causation concept is represented by the domino sequence. (I still have my set of dominoes, which is over 50 years old.) A third edition of Industrial Accident Prevention by H. W. Heinrich, published in 1950, is the source of the following ... 

In 1986, Frank Bird and George Germain [1] used Heinrich s [4] model to develop another accident causation model (Figure 12-8). This model used the same domino theory to show its key concepts of loss control. 

The concept of human error became part of safety lore when Heinrich noted that as improved equipment and methods were introduced, accidents from purely mechanical or physical causes decreased and (hu)man failure became the predominant cause of injury. This assumption became the second of the five dominoes in the famous Domino model, described as fault of person. This is in good agreement with the philosophical and psychological tradition to treat human error as an individual characteristic or a personality trait. A modern example of that is the zero-risk hypothesis of driving, which proposes that drivers aim to keep their subjectively perceived risk at zero level. 

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