A safer barrier (Page 2)

More issues

An alternative to the hierarchy of control

The hierarchy of control is often used as a brainstorming tool to come up with effective controls (aka, barriers). It's good because it favours proactive interventions like eliminating a source of fuel over reactive interventions like putting out a fire. However sometimes it is misused as a formal classification tool.

Barrier states

A barrier can have different states in an incident, mostly divided into four types: 1) Missing barriers 2) Failed barriers 3) Inadequate barriers and 4) Effective barriers. There are considerable differences in interpretation of these states, and when one or the other should be used. Here I'd like to give

30 years after Bhopal

In the media today you can read various accounts on Bhopal, exactly 30 years after the disaster. This video makes you think about how organisations often fail to deal with long term consequences of accidents. Often they already struggle to effectively implement corrective measures directly after an incident analysis is

Human error is like gravity

There are still incidents that get summarised to 'it was caused by human error.' This isn't useful. It'll be difficult to find an incident that doesn't include human error somehow. It's problematic because talking about the human condition as a whole is unlikely to get fixed anytime soon. Let

The root cause fallacy

After an incident has occurred, most investigations will try to find the root cause on a system or management level. To find the underlying reasons for an incident, instead of focusing on the more superficial ones. An important reason for doing this is the assumption that by fixing a single

Your bowtie is too generic

If I could give one piece of advice to a novice bowtie analyst, it would be to include more specific information. Most risk assessments are too generic at first. This is true not just for bowties. It happens in FMEA, HAZID and other methods as well. It's important to get