Effects of Human Factors in Process Safety

Accidents and near-miss accidents in chemical industries are widespread. Most of the incidents occurred due to combinations of organizational and human factors. To identify the causes for an incident of an accident analysis is needed, because it reveals the possible causes behind the accidents. Accident analysis shows the human and organizational factors that support learning from the events. Literature review shows that human error plays an important role of accidents in process industries. The chapter discusses some case studies which are received very little media publicity and also no proper assessment. At first reports on the incidents were collected from newspapers and then the place was visited to conduct an interview with local people and present and past workers with the help of the PESO (M/S Petroleum and Explosive Safety Organization, Eastern Region, Govt. of India).

Situational Awareness – Key Safety Factor For The Officer Of The Watch

One of the main causes of many maritime accidents are errors caused by the human element. Analysis of many maritime accidents at sea shows that situational awareness is one of the most important safety factors. The purpose and objective of this paper is to define the concept, importance and application of situational awareness throughout history until today. It also aims to highlight the high level of situational awareness as an important safety factor possessed by the Officer of the Watch and the overall importance of the same in the maritime domain. It is important to define the role of International Maritime Organization and the World Health Organization in relation to seafarer regulations and situational awareness. To identify the prevalence of low situational awareness as a root cause of accidents through the analysis of statistical data. To demonstrate the consequences of low situational awareness among ship’s crew through examples of tragic maritime accidents, along with identifying human and organizational factors that significantly reduce situational awareness. By defining the role and application of maritime training and modern technological solutions in the efforts to prevent maritime accidents and improve the situational awareness of ship officers. The questionnaire was conducted with the aim of collecting data on the importance of situational awareness from the experienced mariners as a target group. The questionnaire also aimed to obtain more detailed information about the effectiveness offered by modern technological solutions to improve situational awareness. Based on the collected information, arguments and assertions about situational awareness as an important safety factor for the Officer of the Watch, safety recommendations are presented.

Correlation in Causality: A Progressive Study of Hierarchical Relations within Human and Organizational Factors in Coal Mine Accidents

It has been revealed in numerous investigation reports that human and organizational factors (HOFs) are the fundamental causes of coal mine accidents. However, with various kinds of accident-causing factors in coal mines, the lack of systematic analysis of causality within specific HOFs could lead to defective accident precautions. Therefore, this study centered on the data-driven concept and selected 883 coal mine accident reports from 2011 to 2020 as the original data to discover the influencing paths of specific HOFs. First, 55 manifestations with the characteristics of the coal mine accidents were extracted by text segmentation. Second, according to their own attributes, all manifestations were mapped into the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), forming a modified HFACS-CM framework in China’s coal-mining industry with 5 categories, 19 subcategories and 42 unsafe factors. Finally, the Apriori association algorithm was applied to discover the causal association rules among external influences, organizational influences, unsafe supervision, preconditions for unsafe acts and direct unsafe acts layer by layer, exposing four clear accident-causing “trajectories” in HAFCS-CM. This study contributes to the establishment of a systematic causation model for analyzing the causes of coal mine accidents and helps form corresponding risk prevention measures directly and objectively.

The evaluation of common contemporary occupational accident models using two accident investigations

The purpose of this paper is to compare three contemporary accident causation models, namely the Swiss Cheese, HFACS, and Fu (2018) Model-based on two accidents existing in the literature. The accidents reviewed are a mine explosion accident and an electrical plant accident. In this way, the validity of the models can be evaluated and weaknesses and strengths revealed. This study discussed the advantages and possible limitations of these models, and according to this discussion, all these models include human and organizational factors and have been found scientific and systematic. According to the results, Fu (2018) and HFACS are more modern, since they were developed based on Swiss Cheese. The product of this research will be a recommendation for safety investigators and accident inspectors which way to turn when choosing the most applicable accident analysis method