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March/April 2023 issue

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Sector: Energy
Review

Prevention of Accidents and Unwanted Occurrences

Open-access content Thursday 20th July 2017
From the archive:  Just so you know, this article is more than 3 years old.

Book-review-prevention-of-accidents-and-unwanted-occurrences

Rating:

Kjellén, principal adviser at national power company Statkraft in Oslo, and Albrechtsen, associate professor at Trondheim's Science and Technology University, have organised their 500-plus page volume into six sections.

The first, the introduction, includes a case study on limiting air pollution from a fertiliser plant. Section 2 explores the theoretical basis of accident causation and prevention, and includes a chapter devoted to the "human element in accident control". While section 3 covers learning from incidents, section 4 concentrates on monitoring: its five chapters explore different aspects of performance indicators. This section includes loss-based, process-based and causal factor-based indicators as well as an overview -- and guidance on selecting the best performance measures. Section 5's chapters focus on risk assessment, with specific sections on job safety analysis and machinery risk assessment.

They include a worthwhile topic I have never seen covered in any other safety textbook: how to carry out statistical analysis of incident data so as to check the reliability of risk assessment.

The final section ("Putting the pieces together") brings together all the book's lines of thought and relates them to real examples. As you might expect, industries that are especially important to Norway (such as hydropower and oil/gas extraction) dominate, but the underlying messages about what are the most effective control measures are internationally relevant. The end section features appendices (definitions, checklists and questionnaires) and a full bibliography, as well as a comprehensive index.

This work sets out its stall as being both a practical guide and a scientific book. This is a pretty tall order but the authors deliver on their promise. There's too much dwelling on the theory for it to be an easy read but nor is it a simplistic "just follow these seven steps" approach. The theory is always linked to practice and there are enough examples and case studies to keep the text rooted in the real world. It's aimed at a broad readership (safety professionals, insurers, regulators, researchers and students) and all of these groups will find material that's new and interesting. It's probably best seen as a book to refer to rather than to read from cover to cover: it's a heavyweight tome with a price tag to match -- more than justified though by the breadth and depth of material included.

CRC Press (www.crcpress.com)

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Thursday 20th July 2017
  Rating: It opens with a first-person voice (Dekker’s) recalling the death of an unborn child.
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 UK offshore injuries tick up after record low

Monday 31st July 2017
OGUK’s latest health and safety report provides sector-wide data for 2016 on personal safety, process safety, health and helicopters, plus anonymised benchmarking data from 32 installation operators.It notes that 2016 saw the offshore sector’s first fatality since 2013-2014 – a worker died unpacking an offshore container. OGUK notes that the increase in the reportable injury rate – injuries that necessitate seven days away from work – follows a historic low in 2015.
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 Work at height: Elevated risk

Monday 7th August 2017
Falls from height are still the number one cause of workplace injuries and fatalities, which explains why the powered access industry has thrived in the past 35 years as employers and contractors increasingly switch on to the specialised equipment available.
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 Beyond Command and Control: leadership, culture and risk

Monday 7th August 2017
Rating:
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 A Definitive Guide to Behavioural Safety

Friday 11th August 2017
Rating: A different, but just as common, rationale comes from accident investigation. Here, scrutiny of one or more possibly serious accidents reveals that behaviour – what people did or failed to do – was crucial to the chain of events that unfolded. This behaviour needs to be challenged to convince senior managers that effective action has been taken to prevent a re-occurrence.
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 Marvin Owen CMIOSH, director, MBO Safety Services

Thursday 20th July 2017
Aikido is a Japanese martial art. It’s not about competition; it’s really all about self-defence, and that suits me much better than boxing and kickboxing. You’re not there to gain medals – you’re there to learn to defend yourself against attack.I stopped practising aikido at about 25, but I got back into it four years ago. The reason I restarted was mainly to do with general fitness. When I took it up again I’d just turned 40 and I felt as though I needed to start doing something. A local class had started near me and it sounded good so I went along.
Open-access content
Topics
Accident reduction
Sector: Energy
Review
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