I am just getting into Carsten Busch’s book The Heinrich Project III and it has already made it onto my top 10 list for safety pros.
Carsten put together all of H.W. Heinrich’s articles and speeches from when he was with Traveler’s Insurance. If you are a believer, as I am, in many of the traditional OSH approaches to preventing accidents, you will be amazed at Heinrich’s ability to be the safety pioneer he was. To realize he wrote these articles in the 1920’s and 1930’s is just mind-boggling. And much of what he said nearly 100 years ago STILL HOLDS TRUE TODAY. But this book that Carsten has put together compliments Heinrich’s books as we get to see his thought process and reasoning well before his first official safety book was published.
For example:
so many have taken pot shots at the Accident Pryamid, but just 80 pages into this book, Heinrich explains the process that generated the pyramid, of which the vast majority depicted today are NOT what Heinrich and his team at Traveler’s developed.
To be specific in their defense, the pyramid was never intended to claim the peak was a fatality (as normally shown today). In fact, the peak as Heinrich explained it was simply an “OSHA Recorable” in terms of today’s classification. He even stated “not all will involve lost time”.
One of the biggest reasons he and his team pushed the Pyramid was to drive home the point that the 29 and 330 other events that occurred BEFORE the “major injury” have tremendous value in accident prevention efforts, yet most will only spend time and resources on the major injury. (Sounding famailar?)
We can debate the numbers (1, 29, 330) but the idea that we should be investigating ALL events, REGARDLESS of outcome, to understand their causes so that we can work to reduce their likelihood of repeating and/or reduce their severity when they do occur again is something most seasoned safety pros can agree with.
Remember, Heinrich proposed this approach in 1927!!! And yet, nearly 100 years later we are still battling this most simple approach to accident prevention.
