ABSTRACT
At industrial facilities where major accident hazard is posed, for one accidentwith fatalities or severe injuries there are tens of near-misses with consequences just on equipment and hundreds of failures that cause just small loss of production, aswell as procedures notwell understood or applied, with minor consequences. Furthermore in the life of an establishment, thousands non conformances are usually reported both for equipment and for procedures. The benefit of having a good program for analysing andmanaging near-misses, failures and non conformances have been widely demonstrated in many papers, including Hursta et al. (1996), Ashford (1997), Jones et al. (1999), Phimister et al. (2003), Basso et al. (2004), Uth et al. (2004) Sonnemans et al. (2006). There are definitely much more failures, trivial incidents and near-misses, than severe accidents. Furthermore failures and deviations are very easy to identify, to understand, to control. They are quite small in scale, relatively simple to analyze and to resolve. In near-misses, actual accident causes are not hidden to avoid a potential prosecution, unlike the accidents with fatalities, as demonstrated by Bragatto et al. (2007) and Agnello et al. (2007).
