Cause Analysis of Unsafe Behaviors in Hazardous Chemical Accidents: Combined with HFACs and Bayesian Network

Abstract

Hazardous chemical accidents (HCAs) seriously endanger public life, property, and health. Human and organizational factors are important causes of many kinds of accidents. In order to systematically explore the influencing factors of unsafe behaviors in HCAs in China, the method of human factors analysis and classification system based on the Bayesian network (BN-HFACs) was introduced. According to the 39 investigation reports of HCAs in China, the origin Bayesian network (BN) was obtained and the failure sensitivity of every node in BN was calculated. The results have shown that hazardous material environment (1.63) and mechanical equipment (0.49) in the level of preconditions of unsafe behavior have the same direction failure effect with operation error, while there is no factor has the same direction failure effect with operation violate. Some factors in organization influence and unsafe supervision, such as organization climate (0.34), operation guidance (0.37), planned operation (0.22), and legal supervision (0.19), are also important reasons for operational errors, while resource management (0.12), hidden investigation (0.18) and legal supervision (0.13) have an impact on operation violates. Moreover, there are still close relationships between other hierarchical elements, such as the operation guidance effect on the hazardous material environment (6.60), and the organizational climate has the most obvious impact on other factors at the level of organizational factors. Based on the above research conclusions, suggestions for individual, enterprise, and government were put forward, respectively, and the limitations of this study were also clarified.

Perceptions of Safety Climate in Construction Projects between Workers and Managers/Supervisors in the Developing Country of Iran

“…Although great developments have been made as a result of improving preventive measures, the rates of both fatalities and injuries are still unacceptably high [1,2]. In this regard, unsafe behaviors are known to be direct causes of accidents and have been discovered to be predicted by the perceived safety climate (SC) [3]. SC is considered a subset of organizational climate; "it implies a subjective perception and evaluation of safety issues related to the organization, its members, structures and processes, based on the experience of the organizational environment and social relationships" [4], p. 950.…”

Bayesian Network-Based Risk Analysis of Chemical Plant Explosion Accidents

“…In the analysis of the causal factors of CPEAs, it is usually necessary to analyze the importance of each risk factor and put forward effective management suggestions and measures. In order to identify the key nodes in the network, this paper introduces a sensitivity index (SI) to perform SA [ 37 , 38 , 39 ]. SA is used to measure the sensitivity of a model’s output changes to changes of the model’s parameters.…”

Combining semi-quantitative risk assessment, composite indicator and fuzzy logic for evaluation of hazardous chemical accidents

“…Zhao et al 7 identified the trends, chemicals and accident types, causes, and safety management of HCAs in China between 2006 and 2017 and recognized that the primary types of accidents were leakage and explosion of compressed or liquefied gases, and the major reasons for these accidents were operation violation and insufficient production safety training. Whereas another study for the same period (2006–2018) 8 found that the hazardous material environment and mechanical equipment and organization influence and unsafe supervision are among the main factors causing HCAs in China. Jang et al 9 collected data from 2115 cases of chemical accidents that occurred in South Korea over 20 years to establish chemical accident classification codes and a chemical accident reporting system.…”