Slips, trips and the inadequacy of safety departments

Safety Pyramid, H.W. Heinrich 1931

"When people discuss safety in an industrial setting talk almost immediately goes to slips, trip sand falls, debates about unsafe acts versus unsafe conditions and the safety pyramid.

This is totally valid and the approach in this area has undoubtedly reduced near misses, injuries and fatalities.

But they didn't cause the Buncefield explosion, the Deepwater Horizon calamity, the BP Refinery explosion or any of the other major catastrophes in the past two decades.

In fact, the continual focus on slips, trips, falls and unsafe acts detracts from the area where truly catastrophic failures can occur, the management of physical assets. 

This is the introduction to Effective Maintenance - Detective Maintenance (DTIVE) within RCM 101, and it underlines why maintenance and reliability is more important today than it has been at any other time in history. 

We are more dependent on physical assets now than at any other point in history, and as the population continues to grow rapidly this is only going to become an even more intensive dependency.

While the net impact of this is overwhelmingly positive, it also places even more unique responsibility on physical asset managers. 

It also guarantees that when there is any form of catastrophe, aside from natural disasters, the failure of assets will be at its core somewhere. 

This is true for the BP refinery Disaster and the Deepwater Horizon Calamity (USA), for the Hatfield and Potters Bar rail disasters (UK), and for virtually every non-natural disasters I can recall over the past two decades. 

This places renewed importance on the failure management policies we develop and deploy. But beyond that, it also means we need to sit and question our existing practices really, really closely. 

In 2004 Bill C45 became applicable law in Canada, where a person charged with causing a safety incident through negligence OR omission could, at the time, be sentenced to up to $100,000 CND personal fine, and up to 25 years in jail.

In the mid 2000's we saw the charges paid in the UK against those involved with the Hatfield Rail disaster in the UK, and countless other examples since those days. The floodgates have definitely been opened.

One of the very powerful aspects of RCM, when it is correctly implemented, is the production of a detailed audit sheet. Not only the audit sheet but also the audit reports and processes. 

Example of an Audit report from the RCM Analyst toolkit