“…obviously some repairs or whatever will have to be done but from a safety perspective we don’t see that there’s any issue there, so we’re not concerned about it from that perspective…” —W. Denney Pate, Lead Engineer on FIU Bridge Project Obviously, Denney Pate got it wrong. In that voice mail message to the Florida [...]
“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.” –Lionel Trilling Although the phrase, “blaming the victim,” has been around for almost 50 years, it has received renewed attention, especially regarding sexual assault and bullying. Widely condemned, victim blaming is the tendency to blame victims and [...]
“Have you ever noticed when something bad happens, people automatically look for someone to blame?” Amy Roberts I’m not a structural engineer, which means that I’m not qualified to comment on what went wrong when the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed on Thursday, March 15, 2018. I didn’t work on the design or [...]
“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” Isaac Asimov We recently facilitated a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) where the question came up, “What if there was a release and an operator was suddenly overcome? How would we know?” The PHA team considered several possible safeguards: rounds, radio [...]
“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” Henry Ford Your company has had an incident or a near miss, the investigation is closed and the cause has been determined. Now what? In an ideal world, the goal is a return to normal operations with a lower likelihood that the incident [...]
“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein In Incident Investigations: A Guide for Employers, OSHA defines an incident as “a work-related event in which an injury or ill-health (regardless of severity) or fatality occurred, or could have occurred.” Incidents vary from large scale, such as the [...]
