Proposal on the concept and evaluation procedure of human errors in chemicals risk assessment for preventing fire and explosion

Abstract

There have been reports of accidents due to human errors in the industrial sector that handles chemicals. Although risk assessment of chemicals has become mandatory by law, the perspective of human errors has not been reflected in the implementation of risk assessment. Furthermore, although several kinds of risk assessment methods that take human errors into account have been proposed at industrial sites, there is room for further study in terms of identification of human errors, validity of risk assessment methods, and methods of application to risk assessment in order to apply it to risk assessment for chemicals. Therefore, this study examines a method of incorporating the perspective of human errors into the risk assessment method for chemical process industries, which was proposed in 2016 by JNIOSH. This study also proposes the concept of human errors in risk assessment for chemicals and the procedure for evaluating human errors by dividing them into careless mistakes and intentional violations. The applicability of this tool to the work site needs to be studied empirically in the future.