Predicting and Preventing the Unwanted
In this Chapter (page 145) I suggest that it is not necessarily easy to create an FTA that provides insight and is easy to understand. On page 156 I have written about the development of understandable fault trees. The purpose of…
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On page 151 (Chapter 9) I mentioned the need for care when selecting the Top Event, illustrating this with the story of an aeroplane whose engine separated from the wing mount. This case was American Airlines flight 191, A DC10…
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THE CASE The tailings dam failure at an iron ore mine operated by Samarco (jointly owned by BHP Billiton and Vale) in the Bento Rodrigues district of Brazil on 5th November 2015 has been much in the news. One view is that…
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In Chapter 3 (and in Chapter 9) the models introduced make a distinction between Occurrence (time zone 2 in the Time Sequence Model) and Consequence. The process by means of which damage occurs is not specifically related to the damage…
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In Chapter 1, I reiterated Haddon’s point that there is a need to base our science on an understanding of processes rather than description of the phenomenon of interest. Here is what Haddon said in the introduction to his famous…
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On page 12 in Chapter 1, I have quoted part of Gibson’s observation on the term “accident”. The full quotation may be of interest: it is one of the supports for the idea that the term is not a useful…
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Some of the safety slogans seen during the course of work. Many, if not all, of them come from people with an ‘accident prevention’ approach to ‘safety’. SAFE OPERATION HAS NO BOTHERATION LITTLE CARE – LONG LIFE SAFETY FIRST, SECOND…
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On page 4 in Chapter 1, I commented on the propensity for pre-scientific societies to hold supernatural forces responsible for phenomena for which no obvious cause exists. Very recently, the i newspaper in the United Kingdom carried a report of the…
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It is not too uncommon for information to be given by the press (and hence not very reliable) from which spot probability estimates may be made about things that go wrong. One area in which this some times occurs is…
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