I think most people will agree that the safest form of travel is “flying commercially”. Yet this entails being in a tube with wings at 35,000 feet, flying at 400 mph, with 50,000 pounds of jet fuel. So how can an activity be so HAZARDOUS and yet be so LOW in RISKS? This is the difference between Hazard and Risk.
Many safety pros can identify hazards; however, if we lined up 100 safety professionals and asked them to rate the risk of those hazards on a scale of 1 to 25, how many of us believe we would agree on how to quantify the risk they present? Take that simple exercise, multiply it by 10, and now we have a facility that has completed a Hazard ID exercise and can’t agree on which hazards need to be addressed first based on the RISK they present. More on Hazard vs Risk later.
