Regelovertredingen, menselijke fouten en industriële rampen. Een exploratieve studie in een cokesfabriek

Samenvatting

Human disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations to avoid future disasters. This reaction is based on the presumptions that the safety rules are good and can be followed, and that the rule breakers are wrong. Reasons why the personnel of a "cokes" factory had to break safety rules raise doubts about the tenability of these presumptions. This doubt leads to the conclusion that tightening of rules is not always the best measure to take to prevent future disasters. It is unlikely that these same results would have been achieved on the bases of a disaster-evaluation or high reliability theory. In these two approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgment about the blameworthiness of rule breaking. 39 References. Adapted from the source document.