I would say yes, all accidents can have corrective and preventive actions, but as you point out, they may not always be considered practical or cost effective.

In this particular situation, I would have thought that your corrective/preventive action should start with a review of the incident itself, and the precautions you had taken in order to try and prevent it i.e. gritting.

This is a dynamic situation with the weather, so the balance of risk vs preventive measures may have also been changing. So my first questuion would be how do you decide what is an acceptable risk here and is there a point at which it becomes unacceptable. While a blanket "don't come to work if it's icy" may not be practicable, are there circumstances when you do say that?

How did you attempt to reduce the risk? You identify gritting, but what else could you have done? Are there better products/alternatives that work down to a lower temperature?

I'm not going to go through a whole incidnet review here, but I think it's easy to see that however much we though we did, and however small the incident, we can always perform some kind of causal analysis, and if thorough that should always lead to potential risk reduction opportunities. We then have to make the decision whether to implement them or not, which is where the balance of risk vs effort, time etc comes in.

So back to my original statement, yes, we can always take preventive/corrective action, if we want to.

I have to agree with Mersey, having investigated a similar incident earlier this month.
The construction site walkways/access/egress where all gritted through the day and night ensuring safety of operatives, with this also being done daily between 7.00am and 7.30am, but an individual slipped on a patch of ice in a location where no work activities had taken place.
We have experienced over the last 2 months a period of unprecedented cold weather seeing rain/snow turning to ice on impact with the ground this has resulted in numerous road traffic accidents, motorways being closed ect.
The solution would be when temperatures reach zero close all construction sites,schools,workplaces,commercial outlets and public spaces making sure everybody stayed at home.
Due to sudden temperature changes this would involve evacuate workplaces at different times of the day meaning more risks to individuals.
I myself have closed a site twice in the last 2 months and on 1 occasion for a few days because I could not ensure safety of individuals on site, but they could easily of had an accident on the way home, I then obviously need to explain my actions to the commercial guru's.
Going back to Mersey post if you have done as much as reasonably practical you are right there will be occasions accidents are just accidents and no matter what was done or could of been done will be unpreventable.
No doubt this will trigger a lengthy debate!

Technically speaking the preventive actions would have taken place before the accident.

Strictly speaking corrective actions correct a situation once it as occurred

Preventative measures stop the situation developing and thus should not be triggered by ice formation, rather they would seek to find a method of preventing ice ever forming - not easy. Preventative measures are appplied before a situation has ever arisen - once it has arisen, even at some point in the past, all measures are corrective.

Bob

Ray

Before this happened a preventative measure would have been to recognise the potential risk of injury from manually handling pallets because of their size and unwieldy nature and prevent ANY manual handling.

Now the event happens one has to ask whether there were any actions at all that were unusual ?- what did the root cause analysis say? One should be very careful to use the termm simply a freak accident I personally have difficulties with the idea

Bob

Yes, but only if 'the best of their ability' was up to generally acceptable standards, ie they were competent.

Bob, I suspected that someone would question my train of thought. The scenario I presented was a brief one for obvious reasons, but given that it was a large construction site with about 200 operatives most of whom are transient sub-contractors. It is impossible to delve into each and every person and their abilities, training etc. On such a site there are many activities such as M&E, formwork, scaffolding, excavation, brick laying, civils and so on. Indeed, many opportunities for all manner of injuries. I appreciate what you are saying, but in reality there is simply not enough hours in the day to properly manage all these activities in terms of preventive actions.

Thanks for your comments Phil, hindsight is a wonderful thing as everything is so obvious after the event.