Ensuring Environmental, Safety, and Occupational Health is Fully Integrated with System Safety

摘要

System safety has long considered the Environment within its purview and has regarded the new requirements forced upon the community by DoD 5000-2.R as merely a paper drill. Unfortunately, we could not be more wrong as Environmental concerns are real and must be considered in a much broader perspective than was custom within the Safety Community. Environmental safety, including compliance is a valid and separate discipline that requires an extreme amount of expertise that largely lies beyond the scope and grasp of the system safety community. A systems safety engineer cannot alone be an expert in all disciplines, including Environmental Science, required to ensure the safe operation and support of a system throughout its life cycle. Similarly, a Environmental Engineer cannot be schooled on all the knowledge required by the systems/safety engineering profession. A marriage must be consummated between the System Safety and Environmental Safety disciplines to ensure the next generation of systems operates safely and without adverse affects to Environment, System, and Occupational Health (ESOH). The purpose of this paper is to assist in understanding and integrating a viable ESOH program to the mutual benefit of both the System Safety and Environmental Safety communities. This paper will supply both communities with a comprehensive checklist of requirements that should assist in the integration and understanding of both disciplines. Additionally, this paper will look at each discipline's deficiencies and propose mitigating recommendations that hopefully will result in safer systems from all perspectives.