In the years since I started doing work in the engineering health and safety field, I’ve worked with a huge number of organisations, either to identify hazards and manage risk proactively or to investigate and determine root causes after an incident has occurred. In cases where we were helping identify the root cause of an incident, one cause has come up over and over again.
Too often, even if a hazard ID process is carried out, this fails to identify the full range of hazards – usually because entire failure modes or operational phases have simply not been considered. This results in a list of identified hazards that are then managed, but there isn’t much value in that management if there are hazards that haven’t even been identified.
For example, I’ve handled a lot of investigations that ultimately boil down to questions of machinery safety. In those cases, I’ve commonly found that a fairly comprehensive job was done of identifying hazards during normal operation of the machine, but hazard ID is usually less robust for the other operational phases – maintenance, setup, cleaning, etc. In other machinery cases, foreseeable misuse often isn’t considered – hazard ID is carried out on the assumption that people will be strictly adhering to SOPs, which is generally not a sound assumption.
Other examples include the use of mechanical equipment to lift suspended loads – I’ve dealt with a few cases over the years where equipment had been selected based on required strength to support the loads, but hazards related to stability simply hadn’t been considered. In one case, this failure to consider stability as well as strength led to a fatality.
As a field, health and safety has a lot of best practice and guidance on how to assess risk and what can be done to control risk, but all of that is basically useless if hazards aren’t identified in the first place. Hazard ID can sometimes seem like the boring first step before you get to the fun part of designing new controls, but since hazard ID is foundational it’s got to be done right if you’re ultimately going to achieve good outcomes.
Doing hazard ID really well is hard – it’s easy to focus on the operational phase that’s most familiar, to fixate on one of (or a subset of) the hazards, to identify lots of hazards related to the person’s own work but have no knowledge of the hazards associated with anyone else’s, to assume that personnel will be concentrating on their work as much as the person doing the hazard ID is, to miss things because you’re tired, or to fall prey to any of the cognitive biases that plague the human brain when dealing with complex technical systems.
There are many best practices and techniques that can be applied to help achieve comprehensive hazard identification, though. We don’t have space for an exhaustive list, but a few principles that can be applied when you’re doing hazard ID are:
- It can’t be done by one person acting alone – the H&S manager doesn’t know enough, the machine operator doesn’t know enough, the maintenance engineer doesn’t know enough, and the expensive consultant doesn’t know enough. Together, they should know enough – like most aspects of achieving good H&S outcomes, hazard ID is a team sport
- Use some kind of formal framework to guide hazard ID – even a simple set of guide words is more robust than just looking at the situation and writing down hazards that come to mind
- Ask yourselves “what if?” questions – pose contingency questions, imagine a conceivable action or inaction and then explore what that might lead to. Could harm result? If so, you’ve identified a new hazard
- Assume people will make mistakes – because they will. The purpose of most H&S is to protect people from mistakes, not to make them safe when they do everything right
- H&S is never finished – just because you’ve done the hazard ID, risk assessment and implement controls, doesn’t mean you’re done. There’s always room to think of new hazards, so keep looking
About the Author
Senior Safety & Compliance Engineer
Joe has spent most of his career as a consulting engineer, working across a range of industries. The current focus of his work is health & safety and compliance engineering. This covers a wide range of areas, including machinery safety, hazardous substance storage design, seismic assessment of plant and equipment, equipment design & certification, and any other area of engineering work driven by safety or standards compliance.
Joe is a regular provider of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses to engineers via Engineering New Zealand, especially in the area of Health & Safety Engineering. He also provides expert witness and investigation support services to regulators and other clients.