24/11/2020

INDUSTRIAL
ACCIDENTS

• Safety and loss prevention:

The prevention of accidents through the use of appropriate
technologies to identify the hazards of a chemical plant and
eliminate them before an accident occurs.
• Hazard:
A chemical or physical condition that has the potential to
cause damage to people, property, or the environment.
• Risk:
A measure of human injury, environmental damage, or
economic loss in terms of both the incident likelihood and the
magnitude of the loss or injury.
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DEFINITION
• “An occurrence which interrupts or interferes with the
orderly progress of work in an industrial establishment”.
• “An occurrence in an industrial establishment causing
bodily injury to a person which makes him unfit to
resume his duties in the next 48 hours”.
• “An unexpected, unwanted event which can not be
anticipated in advance”.

Nature of accidents
•The nature of accident may vary from industry to
industry. An employee may be caught in a
machine while working on it; or he may fall
against a machine; or may fall from a height
while engaged on a particular task; or explosives
used carelessly may explode. These accidents
may result in disablement or death.

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• Accidents may result in injury, lost time and damage

to premises, plant and equipment.
• Incidents, that is those events which do not result in
injury but result in interruption or stoppage of the
work processes, also need investigation as they could
be the forerunners of future accidents.

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Types of accidents
Depending on the severity of the injury, accidents may be typed as:
• Major accident
• Minor accident
An accident which results in a death or prolong disability to the victim is a 
major one.
A scratch or cut which does not seriously disable one is a minor
accident.
An accident may be internal or external.
Is a worker falls or an object falls on him, it may not show signs of injury 
but they may have e fractured a bone or strained a muscle which an 
internal injury. A deep scratch on the leg or shoulder may show sign of 
injury which is an external injury.

• A worker may be disabled by injury for a day or week

or month or for a few months . If he recovers from
such a disability, his disability is temporary but if the
injury is such that he will never recover fully, his
disability is permanent one.
• A disability may be partial or total. An accident may
be fatal or non‐fatal.

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Accidents costs
• Accident causes enormous crisis directly or indirectly. Certain 
losses can be evaluated in terms of money whereas certain 
other losses cannot be evaluated in terms of money. 
• Whenever an industrial accidents occurs it gives rise to pain for 
the victim and his family and retards industrial productivity 
which in turn, affect the very economic base of the industry. In 
addition to that compensation to be paid to the employees 
involved in an accident is enormous. 
• The management suffers losses involving 
• I. Direct cost
• II. Indirect cost

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I. Direct costs
• i.e the wages of employees is six to ten times the
normal wages because of the loss of goods and
services, compensation and the cost of medical aid,
the cost incurred on training a new worker, loss due
to waste of raw materials; and loss of production an
quality arising out of the inexperience and lack of skill
of the new employee.

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II. Indirect Costs

1.  The cost which the govt. has incur because it has to maintain a large 
number of factory inspectors to check accidents and it has to spend more 
on the employee’s health insurance and other social security benefits and 
the cost of all these is recovered by imposing higher taxes on the people.
2.  The cost of the employee time because he has been without work 
because of his accident.
3.   The cost of loss time because other employers stop work.
4.   The cost of time lost by a foreman, a supervisor or other executive 
while assisting the injured employee, investigating the cause of the 
accidents, arranging for his replacement, selecting and training a new 
employee, preparing the accident report, and attending hearings 
conducted by govt. or other officials.
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Indirect Costs
5. The cost incurred on the machines and tools .
6.  The loss of profit  on the production which the injured 
employee would have been responsible for, including the 
loss incurred because the machine on which he was 
working was idle.
7.   The cost incurred on amount of wages paid to an 
employee  during the period in which he was idle 
following his injury and even after his return to work
8.   Overhead costs: the expense incurred on light, heat, 
rent and such other items, which continue to be used 
while the injured employee is  a non‐producer.

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Accident and loss statistics

• Accident and loss statistics are important measures of the
effectiveness of safety programs. These statistics are valuable for
determining whether a process is safe or whether a safety
procedure is working effectively.
• Many statistical methods are available to characterize accident and
loss performance. These statistics must be used carefully. Like most
statistics they are only averages and do not reflect the potential for
single episodes involving substantial losses. Unfortunately, no
single method is capable of measuring all required aspects. The
three systems considered here are:

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• OSHA incidence rate, 
• Fatal accident rate (FAR), and 
• Fatality rate, or deaths per person per year
• OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health 
Administration of the United States government. OSHA is 
responsible for ensuring that workers are provided with a 
safe working environment. 
• Table 1‐2 contains several OSHA definitions applicable to 
accident statistics.

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• The OSHA incidence rate is based on cases per 100 worker years. A
worker year is assumed to contain 2000 hours (50 work weeks/year
x 40 hours/week). The OSHA incidence rate is therefore based on
200,000 hours of worker exposure to a hazard. The OSHA incidence
rate is calculated from the number of occupational injuries and
illnesses and the total number of employee hours worked during the
applicable period. The following equation is used:

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• An incidence rate can also be based on lost workdays 
instead of injuries and illnesses. For this case

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• The OSHA incidence rate provides information on all types of 
work‐related injuries and illnesses, including fatalities. 
• This provides a better representation of worker accidents than 
systems based on fatalities alone. 
• For instance, a plant might experience many small accidents with 
resulting injuries but no fatalities. On the other hand, fatality 
data cannot be extracted from the OSHA incidence rate without 
additional information. The FAR is used mostly by the British 
chemical industry. This statistic is used here because there are 
some useful and interesting FAR data available in the open 
literature. The FAR reports the number of fatalities based on 
1000 employees working their entire lifetime. The employees are 
assumed to work a total of 50 years. Thus the FAR is based on 
10^8 working hours. The resulting equation is

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• The last method considered is the fatality rate or deaths per person per
year. This system is independent of the number of hours actually
worked and reports only the number of fatalities expected per person
per year. This approach is useful for performing calculations on the
general population, where the number of exposed hours is poorly
defined. The applicable equation is

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Both the OSHA incidence rate and the FAR depend on the number 
of exposed hours. An employee working a ten‐hour shift is at 
greater total risk than one working an eight‐hour shift. A FAR can 
be converted to a fatality rate (or vice versa) if the number of 
exposed hours is known. The OSHA incidence rate cannot be 
readily converted to a FAR or fatality rate because it contains both 
injury and fatality information.

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Global statistics
• The ILO estimates that some 2.3 million women and men around the world
succumb to work‐related accidents or diseases every year; this
corresponds to over 6000 deaths every single day.
• Worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160
million victims of work‐related illnesses annually.
Some of the major findings in the ILO’s latest statistical data on
occupational accidents and diseases, and work‐related deaths on a world‐
wide level include the following:
Diseases related to work cause the most deaths among workers.
Hazardous substances alone are estimated to cause 651,279 deaths a year.
• The construction industry has a disproportionately high rate of recorded
accidents.

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Accident measurement
• Two main statistical ratios have been used to gather accident 
information:
• The frequency rate and severity rate.
• The frequency rate is the number of time‐lost accidents ( or injuries 
which have disabled an employee) per 1,000,000 manhours worked.
• The severity rate, on the other hand, is the total number of days 
charged or lost because of accidents per 1,000,000 manhours work.
• The national safety council of US has given the following formula for 
the computation of these rates:
• ACCIDENT FREQUENCY RATE= Number of disabling work injuries x 
1,000,000/ total number of manhours worked
• SEVERITY RATE = Number of man‐days lost x 1,000,000/Total number 
of man‐hours worked 
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Examples

1000

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