Abstract
Safety-I is a concept that seeks to create defect-free safe work by eliminating “things that might go wrong“ that occurred in past industrial accidents. However, aiming for a Safety-I approach does not always make work safe because it has two fatal flaws. First, we cannot have perfect foresight about “things that might go wrong“, therefore, we cannot completely eliminate those risks from worksites (impracticable perfection). Second, it would be impossible to perform work according to procedures that consider all possibilities within a limited amount of time (impracticable inefficiency). This study aimed to clarify whether there are problems with current occupational accident prevention measures. To achieve this, management and safety officers evaluated the measures taken for 10 occupational accidents in each of five chemical factories in terms of completeness and efficiency. The results demonstrated that most measures had problems. For example, the most frequently implemented countermeasures were changes to and strict observance of appropriate work procedures. However, 76.4% of these countermeasures were rated as incomplete and 88.2% as inefficient. Based on these findings, the author discussed the future of industrial safety.
