by R. E. McClay, CSP East
Carolina University Greenville, NC
Introduction
It has been well established that the focus of the
discipline of ÑSafety Scienceæ and the practice of the Safety Professional is
the anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control of hazards. This can be
said to be a major and critical segment of the Ñscope and function of the
Safety Professionæ. (ASSE) When examining related disciplines such as the
Medical Profession, the Legal Profession and Engineering, one finds that well
formalized, extensive and accepted schema exist within these professions for
examining, describing and studying phenomena of interest. That is true also to
a certain extent in the Safety Profession. The coefficient of friction of
flooring surfaces, the design strength of anchorage points, the flash point of
liquids and the threshold limits of toxic materials all illustrate well
established, formalized, agreed upon principles that are used by the Safety
Profession on a regular basis to describe and characterize potential hazards
and hazard control measures. However, in the area of incident causation it
would appear that a critical gap exists in our science, in that well
established, accepted, generalized principles useful in explaining this
phenomenon, are extremely limited. (Manuele 167) And since this is such a vital
and central core concept within the Ñmetaphysicsæ of Safety Science, it is
probably no exaggeration to say that such a deficiency undermines the efficacy
and validity of our discipline. Even worse, since the related disciplines
mentioned earlier do have accepted and operable schema that they use for
explaining the phenomena of incident causation, the Safety Profession could one
day find itself relegated to a less significant role in applying preventive
strategies across the broad expanse of the hazard control spectra. In short, we
are missing the ÑRosetta Stoneæ needed to decipher the phenomena of incident
causation and we as a profession need to work more diligently to find it.
This
is not to say that Safety Science is totally without stepping stones and
guideposts to assist us in explaining the incident causation process.
Nevertheless, in this age of mapquest and global positioning systems, we need
more than a broken, muddy path to lead us to the true causes of incidents.
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