Posted By Stuart Nagle
Ciaran.
Your opening statement;
'There is no risk in an operation. Either you will achieve your objective or you won’t. Risk exists only in ignorance, that is that you don’t know whether you will succeed or fail. A managed operation, however, is one in which all of the hazards have been considered and the controls have been put in place so that the operation itself is free from risk. If risk continues to exist it can only be because there are insufficient controls and that may be for a variety of reasons'.
Is I think contradictory of itself, as seems to be pointed outin the remainder of your argument.
If a military unit goes into action, their commander accepts there will be fatalities. This is the nature of war. Far removed however, from the nature of a civilians normal working environment, where one does not expect to get killed, and nor should management systems accept death as an acceptable risk factor !!
Hazards may be foreseeable or unforeseen. Risks associated with forseeable hazards are usually foreseeable themselves, and with experience can be managed. There will however always (potenitially) be unforeseen hazards that may result in risks to persons performing a task, remaining unforeseen, but this is where those term come into their own.
The term,'Reasonably Forseeable' as defined within the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997, (the term 'Specified Risk' is not particularly applicable here, being that this term is used to identify those hazards that are peculiar to confined spaces of various type and configuration.)expects that hazards concerned with confined spaces entry are usually known, and therefore can be managed.
Taken in context to a particular task or type of work, in essence, it simply refers to being able to competently assess a potential hazard that may affect the task or work, and management as being an assessment of the likelyhood of it's occurrence and mitigation of the risk. As long as the hazard is known about, an assessment of its likelyhood to occur must be undertaken in the course of managing the risk.
As I am sure you are aware, if we consider confined spaces incidents resulting in deaths, there are only a few where the hazard and resulting fatal outcome could not, in all reasonableness, have been reasonably foreseeable.
Therefore, in conclusion, my final argument in this matter is this - Hazard and risk management has on occassion failed, of this there is no doubt. However, the reason for failure, apart from the fact that it most likely arose from an unforessen hazard, is that whether it was actually unforeseeable.
There are two questions to ask here;
1) Either the hazard was not identified because the person undertaking the assessment was not sufficently competent or experienced enough.
If so this is may be a fault in procedure, policy, or management and/or
2) The hazard was genuinely unforeseeable.
There is no middle ground, or room for errors here, particularly in 'high-risk' areas of working.
It occurs to me therefore that the element of most importance here, is not the hazard or the risk, they may always be there, but the competency and experience of the persons involved in the assessment and the task itself.
Having management suystems in place is fine in theory, and the paperwork will exemplify a managed system even. However, if the practice of the system is floored, it may well fail, and that failure will generally find that the fault was human error, where a particular hazard or related risk was overlooked, incorrectly assessed (often in relation to a 'combination occurence' - the domino theory.), or that those reasponsible where not competent and/or insufficiently trained and experienced.
I rest my case...
Stuart Nagle