The Risk Management of Safety and Dependability: A guide for directors, managers and engineers

The issue of risk should be embedded into the mind set of every engineer and manager to improve safety and dependability. Companies can be held accountable through law when a gross failing in health and safety management has fatal consequences. Here risk management, the organizational structure required and the main factors needed for its successful execution are explored. What risks must be managed as a legal requirement? How is risk quantified? What methods can be used to reduce risk? Such questions are addressed, alongside case histories of recent disasters to illustrate failures in risk management. This accessible book presents the key factors, so that even non-experts in small and medium-sized organisations, as well as engineers and managers, can apply sound safety and dependability principles.

Key Features: complies with the recommendations of the Engineering Technology Board; assesses ways of recognising hazards and procedures for reducing risk in the design of processes, plant and machinery; provides detailed accounts of three major disasters and describes the lessons to be learnt in relation to risk management.

Contents: Ever-present danger: introduction to the principles of risk management; Ignorance is no defence: legislation and the corporate role in managing risk; How to recognise hazards: learning about generic industrial hazards; Human factors in risk management: understanding why humans fail and are unreliable; Exposing hazards: techniques to find possible risks of unacceptable failures in procedures, machines and systems; Safe enough? Methods and procedures for evaluating and reducing risk in the design of processes, plant and machinery; Inherently unsafe: safety issues in planning a new facility; Product risk: managing risk in the design and development process; Asset integrity: learning about the cause and symptoms of age and decay and the need for maintenance to avoid catastrophic failures; Coping with risk: how to ensure the health and safety of people at work; Management disasters: the lessons to be learnt from two major disasters.