Page 23 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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The Improvement Challenge 9

relatively uncontrollable, have accounted for only about 6 percent of past in-
cidents. Causes of the remaining incidents included in the study—14 per-
cent of the total—are not publicly known.
Certainly, safety professionals and line managers can attest to the fact
that most common injuries, including serious injuries, are preventable.
Accident investigations continually reinforce that injuries and other inci-
dents have preventable causes, with many resulting from failures to adhere
to the most basic of accident prevention principles.
Table 1-1 summarizes probable causes of past serious incidents involv-
ing various types of facilities and businesses. An analysis of these past in-
cidents confirms that in nearly all cases they could have been prevented or
their consequences minimized through effective implementation of any
number of actions considered to be fundamental for the type of operation in
which the incident occurred. For example, preventative actions applicable to
past petrochemical incidents include many safety practices fundamental to
that industry—effective maintenance permit systems, piping system isola-
tion techniques, lock-out procedures, operator training, preventative main-
tenance, inspections, audits, process hazard analyses, checklists, testing of
critical instrumentation, redundant features in design of equipment, and
conducting emergency drills.