NIGERIA-IS ACCIDENT A GAIN OR A PAIN?
According
to International Labour Office statistics, 120 million occupational accidents
occur annually at workplaces worldwide. Of these, 210,000 are fatal accidents.
Every day, more than 500 men or women do not come home because they were killed
by accidents at work. These are dramatic numbers which draw fairly little
public attention. Considering the fact that accidents take a considerable
economic toll from nations, companies and individuals, BUT accidents do not get
much publicity.
Fortunately,
there are people working with a sense of purpose, often behind the scenes,
towards understanding and managing safety and accident prevention better, and
their efforts have not been wasted. Our understanding of accident prevention
and safety is on a far higher level than ever before. Many world-class
researchers and safety practitioners share this new knowledge. During the past
twenty decades, knowledge about accidents has evolved considerably. We have
left behind the simplistic model of dividing behaviour and conditions into two
categories: safe or unsafe. The rigid belief that any activity can be placed
into either category has been put aside as more sophisticated systemic models
have been developed and proven effective in managing safety.
The
important observation is that two safe conditions which by themselves are safe
may not be safe together. Workers are the connecting link, as their behaviour
changes according to the environment and their physical surroundings. As an
example, power saws caused many accidents when they came into use in the 1960s
due to a hazard known as “kickback”, which takes the operator by surprise when
the chain-saw blades hit a branch, knot or harder point in wood. Kickback
killed and injured hundreds of people before a guard were invented to protect
the operator. When Sweden implemented regulations requiring the kickback guard,
the number of power saw injuries went down from 2,600 in 1971 to 1,700 in 1972.
This was a major breakthrough in power saw accident prevention.
Every
user of power saws knows from personal experience that this noisy, vibrating
and obviously sharp cutting tool appears to be very dangerous to use, and the beginner
operator is very cautious. However, after hours of experience operators lose
their sense of any hazard and start handling the saw less carefully. The
kickback guard may produce a similar effect. An operator who knows that kickback
is possible try to avoid it. When operators know that there is a mechanical
device preventing the saw from hurting them in event of kickback, they become
less cautious. In another forestry industry chain-saw example, studies have
shown that leg protection makes workers less careful and they expose themselves
more often to kickbacks, because they believe they are protected.
Despite
the fact that kickback protection has helped prevent injuries, the mechanism is
not straightforward. Even if these protective arrangements have been
successful, in the final analysis their effects do not have a linear
relationship with safety. Two safe conditions, kickback guard and leg
protection, do not double the safety. The normal arithmetic of one plus one
equals two (1 + 1 = 2), does not apply in this case, as one plus one makes less
than two. Fortunately, one plus one (1 + 1) makes more than zero in some cases.
In other cases, however, the sum may even be negative.
The
simple division of behaviours and conditions into safe and unsafe does not lead
very far toward prevention. The credit for progress has to be given to systems
management. After understanding that humans, their tasks, their equipment and
the environment make up a dynamic system, we need to make considerable effort towards
more effective accident prevention. The following examples demonstrate the
dynamic nature of people and work. If one component is changed, the others do
not remain the same, and the ultimate safety effect is hard to estimate in
advance.
In
aviation and in other highly engineered and automated systems, we have seen
that increased automation may not necessarily result in improved safety. For
example, operators may not get enough practice to maintain their skills in a
highly automated system. When they then are required to intervene, they may not
have the necessary competence or ability.
Some
paper manufacturers have indicated that younger employees do not understand the
functions of a paper machine as well as the older employees. The older
employees have operated non-automated machines, and they have seen how these
work. The new automated machines are operated from control rooms through
computer keyboards and screens. The operators do not know the exact location of
each component of the machines they operate. Therefore they may bring a
component into a state which, for example, causes a hazard to the maintenance
people in the vicinity. A technical improvement in the machinery or controls
without simultaneous improvement in operators’ skills, knowledge and values may
not result in improved safety.
Accident
prevention has been traditionally based on learning from accidents and near
accidents (near misses). By investigating every incident, we learn about causes
and can take actions towards mitigating or removing the causes. The problem is
that we have not been able to develop, in the absence of sufficiently good
theories, investigation methods which would bring up all the relevant factors
for prevention. An investigation may give a fairly good picture about the causes.
However, this picture is usually relevant only for the specific case
investigated. There may be conditions and factors which contributed to the
accident whose connections the investigators do not recognize or understand.
Generalizing from one accident to other situations bears a degree of risk.
The good
news is that there is now a considerable progress in the area of predictive
safety management. A number of techniques have been developed and have become
routine for industrial safety and risk analysis. These techniques allow us to
study industrial production plants systematically for the identification of
potential hazards and to institute appropriate action before anything happens
through job safety analysis and the risk assessment.
The
chemical and petrochemical industries have shown leadership in this area
worldwide. As a result of major catastrophes, such as BP oil spillage, the use
of the new predictive techniques has increased. Remarkable progress has been
made since the mid-1970s in the area of safety. Many governments have also been
leaders in making safety analysis mandatory. Sweden, Finland, Japan and the
Federal Republic of Germany and have all reduced fatal occupational accidents
by 60 to 70% during this time Many other countries show similar progress even
Nigeria (as a result of accident consequences witnessed in the Niger delta). Now,
the challenge is to transfer our knowledge from research into practical
applications and further improve our preventive efforts.
One of
the new steps in safety management is the notion of safety culture. It may be a
difficult concept, since culture is not a visible entity. It is an abstract
concept prevailing within an organization or society. There are no direct ways
of adjusting it. Safety culture is, however, a crucial concept for
understanding the possibilities of prevention. One of the goals
is to explore this new concept of prevention. It is possible to prevent
occupational accidents. We do not need to tolerate this unnecessary toll to our
well-being and economy.
Commy 2012.
