Technical Note on the Contribution of Sociotechnical Factors to Accidents Notified to MARS.

Not least due to Seveso II, Safety Management Systems (SMS) have become a "hot topic". To reveal how organisations manage safety, classification schemes can be applied to identify plant-specific levels of safety precautions,- from "top level" equipment reliability to "bottom level" safety climate. Such a model is used to classify the accidents in MARS according to levels on which latent failures resulting in accidents did occur, and to cross-compare causation levels with overall accidents "severities". It is shown that the majority of accidents are caused by latent SMS failures and that they have significantly higher "severities" than other accidents.

KIRCHSTEIGER Christian; 

1998-09-17

JRC16640

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC16640,