Chapter 2 Flashcards
What is an accident?
An unplanned process of events that leads to undesired injury, loss of life, damage to the system or the environment.
Accidents just don’t happen, they are a result of?
A long process, with many steps. If the engineer can prevent one or more of these accident steps from occurring, then he can either prevent the mishap or at least mitigate its effects.
What is an almost-accident?
An incident or near-miss.
Preliminary events are?
Anything that influences the initiating event.
Preliminary events set the stage for?
Hazardous conditions.
The initiating event is?
The actual mechanism or condition that causes the accident to occur.
Intermediate events can have what two effects?
They may propagate or ameliorate the accident. For example, defensive driving on highways helps us ameliorate the effects of another persons bad driving.
The U.S. National Safety Council publishes?
Accident Facts annually with estimates of accident costs by industry. Their numbers include estimates for wages lost, medical expenses, insurance administration costs, and uninsured costs.
What is a system safety engineering?
A combination of management and systems engineering practices applied to the evaluation and reduction of risk in a system and its operation.
What is the objective of system safety?
To identify hazards resulting from the use of operation of a system and to eliminate or reduce hazards to an acceptable level of risk.
The system is a combination of?
Hardware, software, people, and the operating environment. In system safety engineering you must look at the entire system from start to finish.
What is the system life cycle?
The design, development, test, production, operation, and disposal of the system.
What is a hazard?
A condition that can cause injury or death, damage to or loss of equipment or property, or environmental harm. An hazard could exist without anything failing.
Hazard addresses only the severity or end result; risk combines
the concept of severity of the accident consequence and the likelihood of it occurring.
What is risk?
Risk is the combination of the probability (or frequency of occurrence) and consequence (or severity) of an accident. There will always be risk.
