Industrial Fire Prevention

From ISHN Behavior-based safety has been practiced since the Ford Motor Company used it to increase seat belt usage in 1970s. Controversy has dogged it ever since, especially in the 1980s and 1990s when the BBS bandwagon attracted a small army of consultants. Organized labor and worker rights activists protested long and loud that BBS was nothing more than a blame the worker tactic. Thousands of businesses spent millions of dollars implementing BBS programs because they believed it was a way to involve workers in their own safety and it was “the next new thing” in safety. On Wednesday, June 23, a plenary session at ASSE’s Safety 2017 drew between 4,000 and 5,000 attendees to a spirited discussion on “BBS at cross roads.” What puts BBS at a cross roads in 2017? It’s the rising popularity of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), called by some the anti-BBS initiative. HOP holds that human error is inevitable and should be expected. The organization of work ...

From ISHN On Thursday, June 22, Dr. Tim Ludwig drew an audience of 500 attendees at ASSE’s Safety 2017 to his presentation on stopping the ever-popular blame game as a safety practice and instead striving for a better understanding of human behavior. According to Dr. Ludwig, a professor at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, if you want to “turn the lights off on your safety culture ” go and blame the worker. By going on the offensive and pointing out that injuries are their fault, a learning moment is lost, Dr. Ludwig said. It’s better to use the incident to learn from behavioral science how to find the true root cause of human behaviors, he said. There is still much relevance and much to be gained from behavioral science, said Dr. Ludwig, who also consults globally as the Safety-Doc. Says Dr. Ludwig: “Our human tendencies result in interactions that hurt the safety of our workers and the effectiveness of the systems we put in place to protect them. One ...

Safety Culture Implications of Normalization of Deviation, sometimes also called a " Normalcy Bias ".  The normalcy bias , or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a possible problem or disaster . It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a the problem or disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a fire or explosion, or disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. As applied to the combustible dust processing industries, we have seen...

Great article showing that High Probability of Occurrence of Safety related incidences does indeed lead to the possibility of a High Consequence Event! At Risk behavior leads to near misses, recorded injuries, lost productivity cases, and eventually fatality. Safety Culture Plus | The Accident Pyramid In order to understand the history of incident presentation, you need a good understanding of what it takes to reduce injuries. The accident pyramid model used many years ago as we will discuss will provide some useful information. In 1969, a study of industrial accidents was undertaken by Frank E. Bird, Jr., who was then the Director of Engineering Services for the Insurance Company of North America. He was interested in the accident ratio of 1 major injury to 29 minor injuries to 300 no-injury accidents first discussed in the 1931 book, Industrial Accident Prevention by. H. W. Heinrich. Refer to Figure 1. Read more here...