February 5, 2025

SAFETY – BASIC DEFINITIONS

Incident:   “ an unplanned event or series of events that has or could have, caused injury to people and /or damage to assets and/or damage to the environment and/or loss of reputation”.

Accident: It is an undesired or unintentional event that results in physical harm to a person or damage to property or environment. It is usually the result of a contact with a source of energy.

►The physical harm in above definition includes injury, death, disease and adverse mental, neurological or systemic effects resulting from an exposure or circumstances encountered in the course of employment.

►Major Accident Hazard (MAH): “ As per defined under rule 2(g) of EPPR,1996 , it means isolated storage and industrial acitivity of hazardous chemicals equal to or in excess of threshold quantities specified in schedules 2 and 3.”

►Over sight: “ It means overlooking or something, error or supervision.”   When there are more switches side by side and looking identical, an operator may operate wrong switch by oversight.

Dangerous Occurrences: As per the section-88 A of Factories Act and Rule 103 of the Gujarat Factories Rules, the following occurrences are prescribed as dangerous and they are reportable in Form No.21(for bodily injury or death) & 21A (for non bodily injury, property damage may or may not be resulted):-

►Error: It is of different types viz human error, design error , planning, production and maintenance error.

►Mistake: It is an act of wrong opinion, judgment about a thing or situation which results in hazard or harm to a person, property or environment.

►Nearmiss: It means any unplanned, sudden event that could have caused injury to man, materials or environment or could have involved a loss of containment possibly giving rise to adverse effect but not resulted in such accident.

►Injury: It is a physical harm or damage to body resulting form an exchange of energy that exceeds the body’s tolerance.

►Risk: It is combination of probability of occurrence and its severity of consequence.              R= P X S

►Unsafe condition: It means existence of a mechanical, physical, chemical or environmental condition, situation or state of affairs, which may cause hazard or accident.

►Unsafe act: It means an act which a prudent (CAREFUL) man should not have done and which results in hazard, accident or injury.

►Hazard: It is defined as “ any event with the potential to cause harm, ill health, injury, damage to property, plants, products or the environment, production losses or increased liabilities.”

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