Thursday, November 24, 2011

Accidents …..Do they happen by chance?

Accidents happen all over the world frequently.
Are these by chance or a quirk of fate like we think or is it due to any other reason.

Lately we have been reading Train mishaps and the Railway authorities institute enquiry commissions to get into its root cause.

There has been an accident in Mumbai last week.
A Local Train passing by had its Door Panel flying off and hitting passengers on another upcountry train.
A child has suffered injuries to the hand and another lady has her arms below the elbow severed off.
Who would have thought that a door panel from an opposite train would fly off and hurt the passengers on another train?
It is so unusual, that it defeats all our imagination.

Accidents are caused due to two main reasons.
Unsafe Act.
Unsafe condition.

Unsafe Act: In this case the child had its hand jutting out of the window and the lady was sitting on the door landing due to lack of space and both got injured. Yes both are attributed to unsafe acts as generally one needs to be inside the train so that nothing would hurt us.

Unsafe Condition: The Door panel should not have got dislocated from an opposite train and fly off.
Isn’t it absurd that this has happened.
The Door cannot just wrench itself off due to the speed of the train.
It indicates that the door panel has not been fitted properly and or it would have become loose due to frequent usage.
But then preventive maintenance of trains should have been carried out at periodical intervals and the hinges etc should have been checked in order to prevent the door falling off.
In this accident the Unsafe condition is the one which has posed a far serious danger to the people than the Unsafe act.

Reducing Unsafe Condition by Good Design:
In our developing world unsafe acts are to be prevented as much as possible by good design of the equipments.
For instance let’s take a toaster in our house ,its design ought to be such that nobody can insert a finger into the hot area,only a bread slice should go in and not the finger.

In order to reduce accidents all unsafe acts should be avoided whereas it is humanly impossible to do just that so the onus of preventing accidents is on reducing the unsafe condition.

3 comments:

debanjan™ said...

Sir,
I strongly agree with your views. We must act responsibly. If we always prefer standing near door (sometimes dangerously leaning outside) during rail journey then accidents bound to be happened.
But still Govt. has to be accountable. In any means there should not be any excuse for this type of freak accident.

debanjan™ said...

Dear Sir,
If you please publish your view on “impact of FDI in retail sector” then I will be grateful to you. Because I think it’s make or break situation for our country….

Ananth Iyer said...

Dear Debanjan,Thanks for your comments on the accidents topic.
Regarding the FDI i have yet to write let me see.
Thanks.