The Role of Human Error in System Accidents

After many years of improvements in technical safety methods and process design, many orgaruzations have found that accident rates, process plant losses and profitability have reached a plateau beyond which further improvements seem impossible to achieve. Another finding is that even in orgarriza-tions with good general safety records, occasional large scale disasters occur which shake public confidence in the chemical process industry. The common 

In addition to these formal studies of human error in the CPI, almost all the major accident investigations in recent years, for example, Texas City, Piper Alpha, the Phillips 66 explosion, Feyzin, Mexico City, have shown that human error was a significant causal factor at the level of design, operations, maintenance or the management of the process. 

Introduction The Role of Human Error in Chemical Process Safety 

TABLE 1.1 Studies of Human Error in the CPI Magnitude of the Human Error Problem  

Garrison (1989) Human error accounted for 563 million of major chemical accidents up to 1984 

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