To ensure work safety, various organizations use different approaches aimed at identifying hazards, assessing risks, and managing them. The employer's task is to do everything possible to preserve the health and life of the employee.
Analyzing how HSE approaches in production have changed in recent years, one can simply compare footage from the legendary film "Vysota" with modern technological workshops in advanced companies, featuring video surveillance with built-in "smart" vision, remote-controlled manipulators in hazardous conditions, and many other engineering solutions.
Nevertheless, catastrophic natural phenomena, accidents, injuries, and incidents still occur, resulting in both fatalities and injured workers.
Studying facts and analyzing the causes of incidents allows us to dig deep and identify the root causes of such events. This experience of "errors" becomes an exceptional basis for taking timely measures to prevent similar incidents from recurring. A vivid example was posted online in 2022: a worker losing balance and falling into a technological opening fenced off only with signal tape.
The workers felt that nothing threatened their routine work.
When asked to approach, the worker, moving along the pipelines, first lost his balance and then, tearing the signal tape at the edge of the technological opening, fell into the opening.
Question: could the worker's fall have been avoided? Of course, yes. Risk assessment must be conducted before starting work, as the route to the workplace passes near the edge of a height difference. In this case, the Severity could be T4 or T5 on the risk matrix, and the probability of the event could also range from 3 to 5.
That is, being or moving near an opening is a high risk. Subsequent events confirmed this.
Useful lessons from this situation include: first, that signal fencing of a danger zone is a precursor to hazardous actions. Technological openings must be protected by safety railings or covered with lids. Second, walking on pipelines is a high risk; for such work, fixed ladders or walkways with service platforms should be provided. That is, footprints on pipelines or metal cladding are also precursors to hazardous actions.
And finally, third: communication. Before suspending work, you must ensure that this does not create a risk for the workers.
Experience comes, and with it, intuition based on observations and knowledge of precursors.
There are no small details in safety.
Risks must be managed, or better yet, foreseen.