TABLE OF CONTENTS It is often said that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. It is very much applicable in the case of 'learning from accidents' in the process industries.
One of the first steps in hazard identification is to ask the following questions:
What hazardous events have occurred in the past, within the organisation or in the industry as a whole, in facilities producing the same or similar product using the same or similar process?
What lessons have been learnt?
Can these events or similar events occur in the process under consideration?
If the answer to (c) is 'yes', what needs to be done to eliminate or prevent the occurrence of those events?
Organisations tend to have poor memory, compounded by a corporate mindset that does not actively promote information sharing on process safety across all of its facilities.
Fortunately, there has been an increasing awareness since the accidents in Flixborough in 1974 and in Seveso in 1976 that there is much to be learnt by systematically capturing the information in the investigation reports of accidents and near-misses. In many countries, accidents and near misses are reportable to the safety regulators, who maintain a database of accident information.
Learning the lessons from available literature data on past accidents, and using them to identify what could happen in the future is referred to by Bond (2002) as the Janus approach to safety. "Janus was a god of the ancient...
