Notification of Process Industry Accident Data for central collection in Sri Lanka

摘要

A recent survey of process industrial accidents in Sri Lanka has shown that most accidents had involved in a fire, explosion, release or emission incident. Such incidents have resulted in destroying the entire containment of inventory in the plant and in some cases of fire the damages have extended to other properties in the vicinity as well. These damages include fatalities, personnel injuries,damages to the environment and properties within the plant as well as outside. The current accident reporting systems in Sri Lanka do not cover reporting all types of accidents above. Several competent authorities are involved in collecting data on certain types of industrial accidents and those data are held by the respective authority. These include accidents involving injuries to workers, death of a worker,hazardous wastes and dangerous occurrences in the industry. Events which result in only environmental damages or near miss incidents are not reported or investigated by the current system.This paper proposes a framework for a system to report data on incidents of all types occurring in the process industry of Sri Lanka to a central collection body. It is called 'Industrial Accident Reporting System (IARS)'. It is capable of collecting data on all types of incidents such as major accidents, accidents and near miss events.These incidents could involve dangerous substances or non-dangerous substances,fatalities or injuries to human life or damages to the environment. Further the IARS is also capable of generating accident notification forms required by the existing regulations in Sri Lanka automatically.The IARS contains three main sections. Firstly the data entry operator has to put in establishment details. Then the information on the accident must be entered with a detailed description. In cases where the workers are injured or a death has occurred,the worker details also must be entered separately.The accident information is entered separately, as preliminary data and as a detailed description. The preliminary data entered include the data available within few hours to one or two days of the accident. These are type of accident, source and types of substances involved, suspected causes and impacts on workers, property and environment. The detailed description is based on data available after the investigation of the whole incident and the contents in this could be analyzed and used as lessons learnt to prevent future accidents.