Major risks and accidents - Cindynic feedback

Erika, Mont Sainte-Odile, AZF, Concorde and the Mont-Blanc Tunnel are just some of the dramatic events and major accidents that have made the headlines, with their far-reaching economic, political and human consequences.

Immediately, the survivors, the families of the victims, the press, radio, television and politicians of all stripes are looking for those responsible for the disaster, even before the causes of the system's failure are known. We need to find those responsible, but above all we need to find those guilty.

Once you've got over the emotion, you need to patiently, calmly and objectively find out what happened. What were the causes of the failure? How did they link together to set in motion a hellish sequence leading to the observed catastrophe?

To understand this, we need to use the wreckage, the ashes, the position of the victims, the recordings that have not been destroyed, the many eyewitness accounts, the archives, the plans, the maintenance operations carried out previously, the dialogues between players that may have been saved, the deviations from the procedures followed... to reconstruct the various probable scenarios that led to the disaster.

As these are a posteriori reconstructions, it is important to be aware of the extreme difficulty of understanding what happened. These analyses lead to the identification of several scenarios to which different probabilities are attached.

Despite the uncertainties that remain, these analyses enable us to identify a number of causes of technical, organizational, informational, human and environmental origin, and above all to understand how they may have interacted to initiate the accident sequence.

With this in mind, we have chosen to analyze a number of major accidents that have occurred in different industrial sectors, in order to highlight any invariants and draw lessons for managers to help them improve their prevention policies.

Each disaster generally gives rise to criminal proceedings that can take up to ten years to complete, not to mention the possibility of appeal or even cassation. We have therefore decided not to take any of the recent accidents mentioned at the beginning of this article, with the exception of the fire under the Mont-Blanc tunnel, for which the Bonneville court handed down its verdict on July 27, 2005.

We therefore chose six accidents that occurred in six different industrial sectors:

• aviation with the Tenerife accident;

• railways with the Flaujac accident;

• off-shore with Piper Alpha ;

• ...