2014 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 115-122
Severe accidents in chemical industries occurred in succession in recent years in Japan and the members of the industries as a whole are taking counter actions to cope with them. The investigation reports of these accidents contain not only the countermeasures for direct causes but also those for safety culture behind them. The authors investigated and classified the causes of these accidents from the viewpoint of components of safety culture which are proposed by the Process Safety Competency Center of Japan Society for Safety Engineering. As a result, the causes are mainly classified into “Commitment” and “Learning”, but there are cases in which more than one component are linked to one cause which suggested that the components have some overlaps between themselves. By using system thinking, we found causal relationships between components and newly proposed causal loops between them. By using these causal loops, we can recognize the relations between causes and components of safety culture in the loops. Thus we can deepen our analysis by ascending components included in a loop and can extend our scope of analysis by including related loops.
