What are accident causation theories? What is Domino theory?
What are other theories about accident causation?
Accident caused due to some failures existed at workplace
and causation theories indicate those failures. Like maintenance failure,
system failure, machine, individual etc. So ultimately it helps us to identify
the key elements need to be taken care of to prevent the accident in future.
Key accident causation theories are as below:
Pure Chance theory, Bird’s accident triangle, Domino Theory,
Energy transfer theory, accident proneness theory.
Among these theories Domino theory is renowned one.
Domino Theory
This theory was developed by Late H.W. Heinrich (Herbert
William Heinrich) in 1931.He was an American industrial safety pioneer from the
1930s. He was an Assistant Superintendent of the Engineering and Inspection
Division of Travelers Insurance Company when he published his book Industrial
Accident Prevention, A Scientific Approach in 1931. One empirical finding from
his 1931 book became known as Heinrich's Law: that in a workplace, for every
accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor
injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries. Because many accidents share
common root causes, addressing more commonplace accidents that cause no
injuries can prevent accidents that cause injuries.
Domino theory states that:
1-
Injury, caused by an
2-
Accident, caused by
3-
Unsafe act or Unsafe condition, because of
4-
Fault of the person, caused by
5-
Social environment.
These all five individual elements are Dominoes given by Heinrich
and removing any one domino ultimately prevents the accident. Usually it is
better to remove middle one and specifically unsafe act. So it is clear cut
accident prevention measures theory directed upon preventing unsafe acts or
unsafe conditions.
This theory was updated by Bird and Loftus and they included
two new concepts which are as below:
1-
Management influence like visible commitment,
visual leadership etc.
2-
Other losses in addition to injuries like workplace
interruption result into productivity loss and property loss.
Multiple Causation: Accidents are usually happens due to
many factors involved and so multiple causation theory try to resolve all those
factors.
So if we see and analyze any incident or accident we will
find the cause is more than one for accident to happen. It is very rare that
only one cause results into accident. So during accident investigation we must
find all those causes results into injury rather than limited to one.
Bird’s Accident Triangle:
He was one of the director in North America’s insurance
company and tried to analyses the 330 incident pyramid of Heinrich (1 Major
injury, 29 Minor injury and 300 no injury). He analyzed 1753498 number of accidents reported by the
companies and found new pyramid of 641 (1 Major injury, 10 Medical treatment
injury, 30 Property damage and 600 no claim). Study reveals that 3,00000 risk
behaviors lead to one major injury.
Difference between Bird’s Accident triangle from Domino’s
was that he concluded that there are more than one reason for accident to
happen, his pyramid was little bit different from Domino’s. Also according to
Bird’s triangle theory Contributory factors can include Environmental factors
like poor machine guarding and Behavioral factors like Bad attitude, lack of
knowledge, lack of skill etc.
Pure Chance theory:
This theory states that accident can happen with anyone and
it is an act of God. No intervention can prevent them.
Accident proneness theory:
This theory states that a category of worker or set of
worker are more prone to workplace accident.
Energy Transfer theory:
This theory states that for any accident to happen there
should be a source of energy, its path and worker at receiver end. If all these
three exists then only an accident may happen.
Conclusion:
Accidents are either happening from one cause or more than
one cause. No claim accident like 300 in Domino and 600 in case of Bird’s
theory lead to billion of dollar loss and still these are no claim. So at
workplace we should correct all factors mentioned in these theories to make
safe workplace.
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