TABLE OF CONTENTS Jeff L. Joseck, Trevor A. Kletz, and an unknown author on the Internet each communicate a different clever story within the first part of the chapter.
Jeff is a talented Staff Engineer employed by a major chemical plant in West Virginia; he has a solid background in Loss Prevention. Jeff Joseck's article was written to spark interest and discussion of process safety in safety meetings. It is also very skillfully worded to spark the readers into thinking about acceptable risks and minimal risks.
Trevor Kletz is the most published Loss Prevention Engineer of all time with nine process safety books and over 100 technical articles. Professor Kletz's topics in this chapter assume that some of the modern synthetic materials we use daily have been available since the dawn of time and that some ordinary materials are being examined in a sort of hazards review session. These are Kletz's most classic, clever illustrations of how we can sometimes be overzealous and too narrow in our focus on a problem.
All three of these short articles show that it is easy to overexaggerate the dangers of unfamiliar conditions and it is also easy for us to forget that man has learned to live comfortably with many of the hazards that surround him. The author thanks both of these writers for their permission to freely copy their work.
This first article was originally published in 1976 in the Imperial Chemical...
