Language issues, an underestimated danger in major hazard control?

Underestimation of language issues in frequently used accident investigation methods

“…This work brings to light that explicitly stated causal factors on language issues in accident investigation methods analyzed in this work (Tripod, FTA, Mort, Soat, Jaspers) have a share of between 0% and 3.7% which is much lower than an estimated 10% of accidents in the process industry where language issues are a causal factor [4]. Though the evidence in this work is limited to five methods and an estimation in the process industry, we conclude that the problem is a systematical one.…”

“…This paper brings to light that there is a discrepancy between the occurrence of language related accidents on the one hand and the attention language problems receive in accident investigation [4] it can be deduced that about 10% of the accidents in process industry is directly related to language problems. This work shows that language issues are poorly represented explicitly as causal factor in frequently used accident investigation methods in the Netherlands: Tripod 2.3%, Jaspers 1%, SOAT 0.6% and for Mort and FTA they are not mentioned at all.…”

“…This was done by associating the language issues in implicit causal factors with 22 specific language issues related dangers or LRD's found in literature [4]. Each implicit causal factor was compared with each of the 22 dangers using an appraisal question: "can the causal factor lead to the language issue related danger (LRD) at hand?".…”

“…Recently, language issues have been identified as an underestimated danger in Seveso II companies, with language issues estimated to affect up to 35% of all human error producing conditions [4]. This leads to a human error literature based estimate of the magnitude of language issues related causality in the process industry of about 10%.…”

“…Lindhout [3] defines "Language issues" as: problems related to communication either verbal, with signs and gestures or their written or stored equivalents. Lindhout and Ale [4] present language issues against a background of a wide variety of underlying causes and promoting conditions. The term "Language issues" elaborates and at the same time extends beyond "poor communication".…”