Reasons for Accident Prevention

The humanitarian reason for accident prevention is based on the notion that it is the duty of any man to ensure the general wellbeing of his fellow men. This places an onus on the employer - the common law duty of care - to provide a safe and healthy working environment for all his employees. 

Financial reasons for accident prevention ensure the continuing financial health of a business and avoid the costs associated with accidents. These include monetary loss to employers, community and society from worker injuries and ill-health, damage to property and production delays. Some, but not all of these costs are insurable and these are known as direct costs. They include the cost of compen-... 

The basic assumption is that the individual always has the choice of whether or not to behave in an unsafe manner. The implication of this assumption is that the responsibility for accident prevention ultimately rests with the individual worker. It also implies that as long as management has expended reasonable efforts to persuade an individual to behave responsibly, has provided training in safe methods of work, and has provided appropriate guarding of hazards or personal protection equipment, then it has discharged its responsibilities for accident prevention. If these remedies fail, the only recourse is disciplinary action and ultimately dismissal. 

Everyone, at all levels of the company, must be accountable and must accept their responsibility for an accident, and more importantly, for working to prevent recurrence. In the end, prevention of future accidents is the ultimate reason for accident investigation. This can only be properly accomplished if there is an honest attempt to answer the who, what, when, where and why questions regarding a vehicle accident. 

The safety adviser can therefore reason via the legal argument for accident prevention on the basis that the employer should avoid attracting a prosecution. 

As might be expected, this simple picture does not hold perfectly. The coefficient of friction tends to increase with increasing velocity and also is smaller if the pavement is wet [14]. On a wet road, /x may be as small as 0.2, and, in fact, one of the principal reasons for patterning the tread and sides of the tire is to prevent the confinement of a water layer between the tire and the road surface. Similarly, the texture of the road surface is important to the wet friction behavior. Properly applied, however, measurements of skid length provide a conservative estimate of the speed of the vehicle when the brakes are first applied, and it has become a routine matter for data of this kind to be obtained at the scene of a serious accident. 

In the incident some of the "hot" tubes became overheated, and started to bulge. Eventually one of the tubes burst open and the contents of the boiler were discharged into the environment. No one was injured in the explosion, but it took several months to repair the boiler and the cost was heavy. In order to prevent another accident, a materials specialist was called in to examine the failed tube and comment on the reasons for the failure. 

There is a second, equally important, reason for this work, namely, to offer a useful contribution to the industrial health and safety literature, for which there is also still an intense, or growing, need. Even with all we have learned, there are still explosions, chemical spills, and other incidents that could have been avoided by following basic standards. Our hope, with this volume, is to prevent such accidents by providing the engineer with the information necessary for a safer, incident-ftw environment. 

ABSTRACT Four hundred and sixty seven coal gas explosion accidents that occurred in China between the years of 1950 and 2000 were investigated through statistical methods so as to review the overall situation and provide quantitative information on coal gas explosion accidents. Statistical characteristics about accident-related factors such as space, time, gas accumulation reasons, gas grade, ignition sources, accidents categories, and accident economic loss were analyzed. Some special conclusions have been achieved. For example, most gas explosion accidents were found to have concentricity on the space-time and hazard characteristics. Such results may be helpful to prevent coal gas explosion accidents. Moreover, comments were made on APS (Accident Prevention System) and safety culture. In conclusion, countermeasures were proposed in accordance with the results of statistical studies, including the change of safety check time. 

Where does all this leave us There are two possible reasons for conducting an accident investigation (1) to assign blame for the accident and (2) to understand why it happened so that future accidents can be prevented. When the goal is to assign blame, the backward chain of events considered often stops when someone or something appropriate to blame is found, such as the baggage handler in the... 

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