A Case Study on the Potential Severity Assessment for Incident Investigation in the Shipbuilding Industry

Korean shipbuilding companies have taken many efforts for safety over the years by developing Health, Safety & Environment (HSE) Management Systems, Procedures, Training, and studying Programs for prevention of incidents. As a result, the shipbuilding industry has succeeded in reducing overall injury rates. Nevertheless, the industry also noticed that incident rates are still not at zero and more importantly, serious injuries and fatalities are still occurring. One factor that may be attributing to this is the lack of managing potential severity during incident investigations, most incident investigations are implemented based on the actual result. Generally, each shipbuilding company develops their customized incident investigation programs and these are also commonly being focused on actual result. This study aimed to develop a shift in strategy toward safety to classify the criteria of potential severity from any incidents and manage that to prevent any recurrence or causing any serious injuries or fatalities in the shipbuilding industry. Several global energy companies have already developed potential severity management tools and applied them in their incident investigations. In order to verify the necessity of improvement for current systems, a case study and comparative analysis between a domestic shipbuilding company and several global energy companies from foreign countries was implemented and comparison of two incident investigation cases from specific offshore projects was conducted to measure the value of a potential severity system. Also, a checklist was established from the data of fatalities and serious injuries in recent 5 years that occurred in Korea shipbuilding industry and a proposal to verify high potential incidents in the incident investigation process and comparative analysis between the assessment by appling proposed checklist and the assessment from a global energy company by using their own system was implemented. As a measure to prevent any incidents, it is required to focus on potential severity assessment during the incident investigation rather than to only control actual result. Hence, this study aims to propose a realistic plan which enables to improve the existing practices of incident investigation and control in the shipbuilding industry.

잠재 심각도 평가 기반의 조선업 재해 분석 활동에 관한 사례 연구