Are all accidents avoidable.

[Dodds]

I want to start a debate on this, hopefully.

We have certain people in this company who think they are and others who don't think so.

Now of course, to err is human and that in itself causes accidents but if people were doing what they should be doing, following procedures, safe work place, fully maintained equipment, correct PPE etc then the accident is avoidable?

Please add your thoughts.

[kevlarion]

I think all accidents are avoidable in hindsight, so are all speeding fines and parking tickets, and every arguement you have ever had could also have been avoided.
However we can't forsee the speed trap around the corner, or account for every circumstance that might happen, or we would be crippled with anxiety and red tape.

I think that given the unpredictable nature of people (and we all have our moments of non compliance which lead to "if only " moments) it is impossible to prevent every skelf and bruise, so we have to concentrate our minds on making it as difficult as we can to get seriously injured, without going to the point that we are prevented from doing what needs to be done.

Personally I think a little risk is good for the soul, that's why we have roller coasters and sport.

[Blackstone]

Whilst we can risk assess, train, write method statements and implement all sorts of control measures, the human factor will always find a way to circumvent all that and someone will get hurt.
The human part is the biggest problem.
As H&S professionals we can put things in place to remove the hazard, lessen the risk, give good information and training, monitor and review the outcomes so that if/when someone does get hurt, the effect is as minor as can be..

When I see things like ... 'Target - Zero accidents' ...
or one I see recently ... 'Aim to be less than Zero' ... what does less than zero even mean?? ...
It just makes me cringe because in the world where humans are involved I do not believe it is possible.

I would say that most accidents are avoidable BUT it is not realistic to expect no accidents to happen.

Just my thoughts

Glen

[witsd]

All individual accidents are avoidable, but some risks can never be reduced to zero. How exactly do you stop Joe Bloggs from tripping over his own feet?

Maybe we could ban him from moving at all, but we'd probably just find ourselves writing "Deep vein thrombosis" into the accident book. ^_^

[c-j-r]

Of course all risks are avoidable, shut down all factories and work places, everyone lock themselves in a room with enough food and water to see out there remaining days........(to be honest, even then humans will still hurt themselves) however we live in a real world and unfortunately not all accidents are avoidable, take cars for example, they can park themselves, come to a stop if they see a hazard , hell even drive themselves! but it doesn't stop Mr Big Shot doing 100mph in his Land Rover talking on his phone, only to loose concentration and control of the car and take a few people with him.

pfft Humans........

[abarnett]

I think that you can reduce and remove as many of the factors that are likely to cause an accident but you can never avoid them completely...

there are too many variables - mostly around human behaviour - to be able to avoid every single possibility. The only way to truly avoid every single accident would be time travel!! (if only there was a tardis emoticon... )

[Jack Kane]

The way I see it is that I'm at work today and fully intend not getting hurt or hurting somebody else. This involves me following the rules in place in our facility to protect me and others.

Tomorrow, I fully intend to do the same and my expectation is that I will do the same. My expectation is that others will also do the same.

One week from today, I have the same expectations...one month from now, 1 year etc.

Those are my beliefs and I know that not everybody shares them, maybe in principle, but not in practice. My intention is to keep doing what I'm doing with the aim of making that belief infectious.

I have an office job, but if I worked in a forging plant, I'd have the same thought process. I'd make sure I followed all the rules in place, and helped improve them proactively. I'd make sure I made an excellent product for that product to move along and become something else. My product could then end up being a high quality machinery part. That part, if everybody follows my thinking, will be maintained proactively, inspected, audited and will work without fault for its intended working life.

So, if my outputs are to become somebody else's inputs and I get them right, the next person does the same, and the next etc etc. We all win a watch.

Not many people live in my wee world though. I like a challenge

[Keith1983]

I wonder if we changed the question slightly if we would get the same response:

I believe that all accidents are avoidable, after all when we have accidents we look for a route cause and we look to put measures in place to prevent reoccurrence. The fact that we do this goes some way in my mind to proving that they are avoidable.

The trick is making them foreseeable, so I'd like to pose a slightly different question;

Are all accidents foreseeable?

My response to this is no. We simply cannot have the incredible depth and history of knowledge to foresee everything. As an example, a piece of degreasing plant at a previous employer managed to dump its 2000 litres of a nasty solvent all over the floor. We cleaned the spill and avoided anyone coming to any harm. We did suffer a loss in production time, but no injuries or illnesses resulted. We called out the appropriate technician for the piece of kit and we whittled the cause down to be a fault in a particular valve. This engineer and indeed the manufacturer of the equipment had never witnessed this fault previously and this piece of equipment had been in the workplace for over 20 years in different shapes and sizes. We had operated the machinery according to all of the manuals, procedures etc etc.

So for us as the user of this equipment was there anything we could have done to make this foreseeable? Not in my opinion.

Was the accident ultimately avoidable, yes. The manufacturer could test each and every valve they put on their equipment and then they would have found a fault with this one particular item.

So for me, we should be taking steps to make the foreseeable avoidable. that which is not foreseeable is a little bit more tricky!

[witsd]

Are all accidents foreseeable?

My response to this is no. We simply cannot have the incredible depth and history of knowledge to foresee everything.

Absolutely. Even more so when you consider more outlandish accidents involving 'acts of god' – a lightning strike outdoors, a sinkhole opening, a worker hit on the head by a meteorite. We can just about predict the weather well enough to make preparations for high winds / floods etc. but in some areas, we are centuries away from the technology required to make accurate predictions.

But perhaps those are moving away from the industry definition of 'accident'?

[bernicarey]

Short answer, NO.

Long answer... Noooooo!

As others have stated, we can reduce to a low figure the total occurrences, but can never remove all. We have to mitigate as must as we can but there is a limit.

Some of it comes down to the definition of 'accident', where you include 'Acts of God' or not.

Let me tell you a story from almost 40 years ago. In the late 70's, I recall reading an accident report on the loss of an RAF Jaguar aircraft. It suddenly went out of control and crashed, luckily the pilot survived. Nobody knew why the aircraft had suddenly become uncontrollable and ploughed into the ground. I can't remember the full details, but essentially it was thus...

They put the pilot in the Flight Simulator and had him repeat his flight many times, eventually he crashed the Simulator too. They then did some more flying in the Simulator and found that at one unique combination of Altitude, Attitude, Bank, Roll, Yaw, Speed and just about every other combination of spacial positioning in the sky, the flying control computer (this was the 70's remember so pretty basic 1 and 0 stuff) encountered a bit of Code that made no sense, so did some very strange things and within seconds the aircraft crashed.
Now from 1st prototype flight to this crash was quite a few years, there were hundreds of these aircraft flying around in UK, French and other service so 100,000s of hours flying but nobody had ever caused the flight computers to try and use this line of Code. So nobody else had crashed.
At what point should they have stopped testing and put this aircraft into service?

Was it preventable/avoidable? Yes, but it might have taken a couple of centuries to find the potential problem, so therefore not 'reasonably practicable' .

[Keith1983]

Cracking example that Berni. I may use that in future to demonstrate what is practicable etc.

I recall reading an accident report on the loss of an RAF Jaguar aircraft. It suddenly went out of control and crashed, luckily the pilot survived. Nobody knew why the aircraft had suddenly become uncontrollable and ploughed into the ground. I can't remember the full details, but essentially it was thus...

They put the pilot in the Flight Simulator and had him repeat his flight many times, eventually he crashed the Simulator too. They then did some more flying in the Simulator and found that at one unique combination of Altitude, Attitude, Bank, Roll, Yaw, Speed and just about every other combination of spacial positioning in the sky, the flying control computer (this was the 70's remember so pretty basic 1 and 0 stuff) encountered a bit of Code that made no sense, so did some very strange things and within seconds the aircraft crashed.
Now from 1st prototype flight to this crash was quite a few years, there were hundreds of these aircraft flying around in UK, French and other service so 100,000s of hours flying but nobody had ever caused the flight computers to try and use this line of Code. So nobody else had crashed.
At what point should they have stopped testing and put this aircraft into service?

Was it preventable/avoidable? Yes, but it might have taken a couple of centuries to find the potential problem, so therefore not 'reasonably practicable' .

[ssmith65]

A really good topic for discussion on a Friday afternoon.

Links in really well with an article I read a while ago about the sinking of the Titanic.

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