In the safety world there is a general belief traceable back to Heinrich in 1931, in the similarity of causes of minor and major accidents. This leads to the belief that one can prevent the major accidents in a company by studying and tackling the minor accidents. The objective o[ this paper is to show that this general belief is based on careless reasoning and is not supported by the limited research which there is. If indiscriminately applied, it can mislead companies and safety experts into seriously misdirecting safety efforts and can give them unreasonable expectations about the control of risk. Only if reasoning based on an explicit deviation model is carefully applied can clear indicators of potential major accident scenarios be derived and can this pitfall be avoided. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting