Risk Assessment Safeguards, do they protect all scenarios?

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I’m writing this column article after a few days of incidents globally which led me to think about safeguards.

In every risk assessment we do, we think about what can go wrong. What is the consequence and how can we prevent it.

A recent incident involved an airplane attempted terrorist attack in which someone in the cockpit tried to bring the plane down, the passengers overcame the person and prevented the attempted event.

I remember when it was commonplace for people to be able to go to the cockpit and see the flight deck. Roll on a few years and there were attempts on taking over the cockpit from the passenger side. Roll on locking down the cockpits. A perfectly considered safeguard for people trying to access the cockpit from an attack perspective. Perfect!

Now switch to the events of the last few weeks, we now have someone intent on causing harm locked in the cockpit where no one can prevent it! Safeguard is now not helping!

So how did we get to this safeguard? All previous incidents involved unauthorised people trying to access the cockpit. Did the team consider the other way around about locking someone into the cockpit who might want to cause harm. Probably not, as the people in the cockpit are authorised to access this space are known to the team and there is no history of these issues occurring.

Don’t get me wrong as a hazard study leader sometimes it is difficult to get the correct balance about how to use safeguards, the validity of the safeguard and its impact. One of the prompts when doing Functional Safety Assessments is a prompt saying ‘Can additional hazards be caused by implementing the function?’ Now why do we ask this?

We are trying to understand if we protected against this can we cause another problem. Similarly to the cockpit example if we close the inlet to a tank what happens to the place where the liquid is coming from? Will this cause the line to surge and split? The source tank to overfill? Are we really protecting against the hazard or moving it elsewhere.

How many of your safeguards cause issues elsewhere? Do you really know?

We should all be asking these questions when conducting all risk assessments asking staff to wear PPE, does this allow the task to be completed safely or hinder the task?

Does the safety device activate too often and lead to excessive relieving of materials to atmosphere?

A very hard challenge to resolve and one that needs careful consideration. No answers in this column more prompts to think about. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on do all safeguards really make things safer and therefore ALARP or introduce new problems.

p.s. Thanks to everyone who supported my event, The Widnes Duck Hunt, we managed to raise a whopping £4,295 vs our target of £1,800 we bought the defibrillator that we wanted to and gave the charity money to help with maintenance of the 50 units in the community.