TBD

Abstract

I have been noticing a definite uptick in the number of industry groups that are talking about the benefits of system safety. Many of them don’t know that they are “inventing” an approach that has been successfully used for almost 100 years on millions of projects with a combined value of tens of trillions of dollars. It seems that many of these groups believe they came up with the “new” idea that designing safety into projects is better, less expensive and results in fewer false starts than traditional safety approaches — not to mention that it is also more effective in reducing accident losses.

System safety is an engineering process that starts as early as practical and continues throughout the project’s life until there is no longer value in continuing. Conceptually, system safety consists of three simple steps:

1. Identify potential hazards.
2. Control the risks associated with those identified hazards to acceptable levels.
3. Repeat.