Читать книгу Risk Assessment - Marvin Rausand - Страница 76

Conditions, events, and sequences that precede and lead up to accidents.

A precursor is therefore something that happens that may alert us that an accident is imminent. If precursors can be identified, this offers a great potential for avoiding accidents. Many organizations have developed systems to identify accident precursors and made procedures on how to intervene before any accident occurs.

It is sometimes easy to spot precursors after an accident has occurred. More difficult is to identify precursors upfront an accident. Precursors are often technical failures, human errors, or operating conditions that individually or in combination with other precursors, may lead to an accident. Often, precursors can be identified when they lead to incidents and near accidents that were stopped by functioning safety controls. An incident (with no significant consequences) is not a precursor, but may help to reveal precursors (e.g. see U.S. DOE 1996).