Overview

Accidents in chemical plants may harm the process, the personnel or both. Research on accidents is relevant, therefore, both to accidents which result in property damage and those which cause personal injury.

Accident research as a discipline tends to concern itself primarily with those accidents in which people are involved. It is primarily concerned, therefore, with injury to personnel. But it does involve the study of the total accident situation. Often it is a matter of chance whether this situation hazards the processor the people. Clearly accident research is closely related to work in other fields such as human factors and, in particular, human error.

Accounts of accident research include Occupational Accident Research (Kjellen, 1984), Information Processing and Human--Machine Interaction (Rasmussen, 1986), Individual Behavior in the Control of Danger (A.R. Hale and Glendon, 1987) and Human Error (Reason, 1990). Many of the classic papers in the field are given with commentary in the collection Accident Research, Methods and Approaches (Haddon, Suchman and Klein, 1964).

Much work on the subject is concerned with areas which are not of prime interest here, such as accidents to children, accidents in the home and traffic accidents.

In addition to work on personal accidents, it is convenient to deal here briefly with some principal research programmes on, and test sites for, major hazards.

Selected references on accident research are given in Table 26.1.