The Consequences of Managing Risk on Paper

When a single type of accident like explosions produces a large percentage of relatively infrequent but costly disasters, analysts must determine whether or not to factor these statistics into the overall accident rate. The choice of which factors to include can have important consequences because individuals use these statistics to argue for changes in policy and practice. 

When South Africa s Leon Commission calculated the risk of explosions, for example, they deliberately omitted explosion statistics from their accident data because, they argued, explosions of this kind. .. tend to disturb the long term trend of statistics. If they included data from explosions in longterm mine safety statistics, they feared they would disturb general accident 

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