Author: Neale, Michael;
Published: 16
January
2007
Abstract
Serious accidents, involving casualties or major financial loss, continue to occur all over the world in a wide variety of circumstances, ranging from motor vehicles and trains, to aircraft and industrial sites. Engineering issues frequently arise, so professional engineers get involved in investigating the causes, and there are lessons to be learnt.
This paper is based on the experience of a group of engineers, who have been investigating engineering failures and accidents all over the world for over 40 years. It attempts to distil an understanding of the causes of these accidents from this experience, and match it to a review of the many published reports on major incidents.
The main conclusion is that virtually all these accidents have multiple causes, and each incident arises when an appropriate combination of causes comes together at one time and place. The paper attempts to determine the various generic sources of these causes, which relate to particular accident environments and gives specific examples for a number of different accident types. The most common generic sources of the causes, relate to engineering problems, followed by management problems, operator errors and environmental effects. The critical importance of engineering problems and their analysis in relation to the complex circumstances of most accidents, emphasises that an engineering team have a major contribution to make.