System safety courses

Sixth, there is a real shortage of well-qualified system safety engineers. Few engineering schools include safety or system safety courses in their curricula. This problem is greatly compounded by the lack of standardization mentioned earlier. Not only are courses, instructors, and texts lacking but also there is no common body of knowledge to teach ... 

To implement a system safety program, the personnel involved have to be properly trained. A comprehensive training program is particularly important until system safety courses are established in the curricula of engineering, management, and safety majors in colleges and universities. A recommended training plan is included in Chapter 9. 

Webb, Murray and Associates, Inc. (WMA), Houston, particularly Bob Webb, Bob Murray, and Billy Magee, officers, and the talented WMA safety engineers and consultants. My time as director of WMA s Center for Advanced Safety Studies provided me with an opportunity to develop and teach system safety courses for NASA, DOD, DOT, and private industry and to participate in system safety projects. 

Although most courses are geared primarily toward the aviation industry, the university does offer an exceptional system safety course as well as a software safety seminar. 

Process safety is described as the application of engineering, science, and human factors to the design and operation of chemical processes and systems. Safety courses for process technicians deal with use of safety equipment, process safety analysis, and the prevention of injuries, fatalities, fires, explosions, or unexpected releases of hazardous materials. Safety training is designed to keep employees safe and productive, protect the community, environment, and protect equipment and physical facilities. 

Not all was lost. The process provided valuable instruction relative to ignition devices, bridge wires, drop wires, insulation, and crimping. In an attempt to hold all variables to an absolute maximum, wc did not try to make more than one component at a time, and no experiments were done with match-lit fuze and cap systems. Safety fuze is extremely difficult to make at home, and a successful electric cap could always be changed over to safety fuze if necessary, we reasoned. In the course of the discovery process, we were able to expose a great many fables and old wives tales regarding detonating explosives. 

The desire to predict the future often leads to collecting a large amount of information based on the hope that something useful will be obtained and noticed. The NASA Space Shuttle program was collecting six hundred metrics a month before the loss of Columbia. Companies often collect data on occupational safety, such as days without a lost time accident, and they assume that these data reflect on system safety [17], which of course it does not. Not only is this misuse of data potentially misleading, but collecting information that may not be indicative of real risk diverts limited resources and attention from more effective risk-reduction efforts. 

Human performance is usually critical to system safety, yet, as discussed many times throughout this series of books, human behavior is essentially impossible to quantify. There is no way that a quantification analysis can incorporate the fact that an operator is distracted due to a fight he had with his wife just before coming to work, so does not take the correct actions during the course of a plant upset. 

Part of my role as safety advisor was to train the safety teams in all aspects of the system so that they were competent to implement and coordinate it in their own areas of responsibility. I also assisted in developing the newly redesigned safety team and taught them accident and near-miss investigation techniques, risk management, and other safety system-related courses. 

From the above given description of critical infrastructure it follows that the critical infrastructure is a system composed of mutually interconnected systems. In this coherence it is important that mutual interconnection means dependence. Safety of each system, imderstood as the set of measures that ensure the safe infrastructure that can sustainable develop of course depends on the infrastructure nature. The system safety inherently includes the system protection. The safety of system that is a set ofmutually dependent subsystems is predetermined not only by safety of individual subsystems but also by character of mutual interconnections. 

The safety organization establishes a comprehensive system safety training program. At a minimum, the following courses are recommended ... 

System Safety Working Group Workshop A 4.5-day program for members of SSWGs. (See appendix for course outline and Hgure 9-3 for course schedule.)... 

Figure 9-3 System safety working group workshop. Course schedule for workshop presented by safety organization to train SSWG members.

What are the three core training courses recommended to support the system safety effort ... 

Figure 12-1 Basic response model. (Source System Safety Development Center (SSDC) course handouts.)...

The safety professionals at the System Safety Development Center were contacted for assistance in determining what had happened and in determining the appropriate course of action concerning the use of the buses at the end of the day to transport the work force back home. 

Time-loss analysis is a special-purpose technique used to evaluate accident responses. System Safety Development Center courses that teach the technique credit the National Transportation Safety Board (specifically Driver and Benner) with developing and reporting the technique. 

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