Safety engineering eliminating hazards

Often an organization will strive for the elimination of a specific toxic material from a given process. Alternatives will also have other hazards and risks that require an informed choice. The industrial hygienist, chemist, and safety engineer play an important role in developing the information for making the selection between alternatives. 

Industrial fire protection and safety engineers attempt to eliminate hazards at their source or to reduce their intensity with protective systems. Hazard elimination may typically require the use of alternative and less toxic materials, changes in the process, spacing or guarding, improved ventilation or, spill control or inventory reduction measures, fire and explosion protective measures - both active and passive mechanisms, protective clothing, etc. The level or protection is dependent on the risk prevalent at the facility versus the cost to implement safety measures. 

System Safety Engineering The system engineering processes used to prevent accidents by identifying and eliminating or controlling hazards. Note that hazards are not the same as failures dealing with failures is usually the province of reliability engineering. 

Safety engineering is the discipline that attempts to reduce the risks by eliminating or controlling the hazards [p. 3],... 

Employers should not look to training as the primary method for preventing workplace incidents that result in death, injury, illness, property damage or other down grading incidents. They should see if engineering revisions can eliminate the physical safety and health hazards entirely [p. 6]. 

System safety engineering An engineering discipline requiring specialized professional knowledge and skills in applying scientific and engineering principles, criteria, and techniques to identify and eliminate hazards, or reduce the risk associated with hazards (MIL-STD-882). 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has defined Abatement as action by an employer to comply with a cited standard or regulation or to eliminate a recognized safety or health hazard identified by OSHA during an inspection. Examples of methods commonly used to abate cited hazards include the use of engineering controls, correction of a deficiency in a program, or the use of permissible equipment to avoid a hazard. 

Incorporate Safety Devices if identified hazards cannot be effectively eliminated or their associated risk adequately reduced to acceptable levels through system design, that risk should be reduced through the use of engineering controls and safety devices. These may include fixed, automatic, or other protective safety design and hazard limitation or control features or devices. Also, when applicable, provisions should be made for periodic functional checks and maintenance of any safety devices. 

In 1925, the National Safety Council s College Committee gave a report at the Annual Congress. The tide of the report was Accident Prevention and the Engineer. The report focused on two ways to prevent accidents education and the elimination of hazards. The report stated that the two go hand in hand and are inseparable. The authors described two approaches to eliminate hazards. One involved safeguards that are accessory devices and not integral parts of machines themselves. 

Safety engineers identify the approach of using explosion-proof hardware as being "containing." This approach assumes that an ignition can occur and seeks to eliminate damage and hazard when it does. 

The most important thing to remember is that system safety engineering is a combination of management and systems engineering practices applied to the evaluation and reduction of risk in a system and its operation. The objective of system safety is to identify hazards resulting from the use or operation of a system and to eliminate or reduce the hazards to an acceptable level of risk. 

Most would agree that the primary focus of safety engineering is to prevent unsafe conditions. By eliminating hazards altogether, by reducing the severity of a hazard, or by reducing the likelihood that conditions will lead to an undesired event, accidents can be prevented. 

If we want to take measures to improve occupational safety and place special emphasis on man-hazard interaction, then the first step must clearly be the attempt to eliminate existing hazards (see Chapter 1 and 2). Safety engineers must be made responsible for this endeavor. No attempts to improve man-hazard interaction can be made until this has been accomplished. 

---