| Industrial / Commercial Accidents / Product Liability
STG is independent of all organisations and has an arm's-length relationship with the Police, transport operators, transport regulatory authorities, unions, insurers and any other organisations that may have some involvement in the investigation or in the occurrence under investigation. This independence is seen by the transport industry as making an important contribution to STG's effectiveness in determining causes and making effective recommendations to prevent similar accidents.
STG maintains its independence for four important reasons:
- Independence from the regulator, operators, and the transport industry enables STG to investigate and comment impartially on any role the regulator or other groups might have been able to play in preventing the accident;
- Independence from the Police and regulatory authorities allows people to talk to STG's investigators freely in the knowledge that the Commission can not use that information to punish someone or discipline and organisation;
- Independence from the Police and regulatory authorities ensures that any prosecution brought by them does not compromise or delay STG's own investigation and report on the accident.
- Independence from other agencies gives STG full control over approving and publishing its reports, subject to the right of any party to apply to a Court to obtain a stay of publication to facilitate judicial review of the contents of a report.
Reasons to Retain a Certified Private Accident Investigator
- Protect Yourself , Assets & Employees in Litagation
- Establish a Record of the Incident
- Comparison of an Independent Study
- Maintain a Certified Staff for Immediate Response
- Maintain a Record of Periodic Safety Audits
Accident Analysis is performed in four steps:
1) Fact gathering After an accident happened a forensic process starts to gather all possibly relevant facts that may contribute to understanding the accident.
2) Fact Analysis After the forensic process has been completed or at least delivered some results the facts are put together to give a "big picture." The history of the accident is reconstructed and checked for consistency and plausibility.
3) Conclusion Drawing If the accident history is sufficiently informative conclusions can be drawn about causation and contributing factors.
4) Countermeasures In some cases the development of countermeasures is desired or recommendations have to be issued to prevent further accidents of the same kind.
There exist numerous forms of Accident Analysis methods. These can be divided into three categories (in alphabetical order):
Causal Analysis uses the principle of causality to determine the course of events. Though people casually speak of a "chain of events" results from Causal Analysis usually have the form of directed a-cyclic graphs. The nodes being events and the edges the cause-effect relations. Methods of Causal Analysis differ in their respective notion of causation.
Expert Analysis relies on the knowledge and experience of field experts. This form of analysis usually lacks a rigorous (formal/semiformal) methodological approach. This usually affects falsify-ability and objectivity of analyses. This is of importance when conclusions are heavily disputed among experts.
Organisational Analysis relies on systemic theories of organisation. Most theories imply that if a systems behaviour stayed within the bounds of the ideal organisation then no accidents can occur. Organisational Analysis can be falsified and results from analyses can be checked for objectivity. Choosing an organisational theory for accident analysis comes implies the assumption that the system to be analysed conforms to that theory.
An accident is a specific, identifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external event which occurs in a particular time and place, without apparent cause but with marked effects. It implies a generally negative probabilistic outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence.
Narrowly defined, the designation may refer only to the event, while not including the circumstances (facts surrounding) or results of the event; i.e., ‘accident’ is constrained to an immediate incident, the occurrence of which results in an unplanned outcome. In common use, however, ‘accident’ may include the entire interacting circumstantial framework (chance, pre-existing, or uncontrolled dynamically developing conditions; commonplace actions; random time and place; participants; etc.) leading up to, including, and resulting from, the accident's immediate occurrence. Experts in the field of injury prevention avoid use of the term "accident" because they look at these incidents from the perspective of epidemiology - predictable and preventable.
Accidents of particularly common types (auto, fire, etc.) are investigated to identify how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be deterministically predicted. For example, a root cause of an uncommon and purely random accident may never be identified, and thus future similar accidents remain "accidental."
Physical examples include, e.g., unintended collisions or falls, being injured by touching something sharp, hot, or electrical, or ingesting poison. Non-physical examples are, e.g, unintentionally revealing a secret or otherwise saying something incorrectly, forgetting an appointment, etc.
The informal term "freak accident" typically refers to an unfortunate and improbable event that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen by chance. In extreme contexts, the term may also imply doubt, ambiguity or suspicion about an accident event's cause.
Colloquially considered negative, 'happy' accidents with positive results are also possible.
Road-traffic safety aims to reduce the harm (deaths, injuries, and property damage) resulting from crashes of road vehicles. Harm from road-traffic crashes is greater than that from all other transportation modes (air, sea, space, off-terrain, etc.) combined.
Road-traffic crashes are one of the world’s largest public health and injury prevention problems. The problem is all the more acute because the victims are overwhelmingly young and healthy prior to their crashes. According to the World Health Organization more than a million people are killed on the world’s roads each year [1].
Road-traffic safety deals exclusively with road-traffic crashes – how to reduce their number and their consequences. A road-traffic crash is an event involving a road vehicle that results in harm. For reasons of clear data collection, only harm involving a road vehicle is included. A person tripping with fatal consequences on a public road is not included as a road-traffic fatality. To be counted a pedestrian fatality, the victim must be struck by a road vehicle.
The word “accident” began to disappear from professional literature in the late 1960s as more science was focused on the problem. It should not be used for reasons published in the worlds most prestigious peer-reviewed journals and by the preeminent contributors to the science of the subject.
The word accident conveys a sense that the losses are due exclusively to fate. Perhaps this is what gives accident its most potent appeal – the sense that it exonerates participants from responsibility. Accident also conveys a sense that losses are devoid of predictability. Yet the purpose of studying safety is to examine factors that influence crashes. Some crashes are purposeful acts for which the term accident would be inappropriate even in popular use.
Accidents
A motor accident, sometimes called a crash or wreck, is an incident in which a Auto,Truck, Motorized Cycle or Wheeled Vehicle collides with anything that causes damage, including other automobiles, telephone poles, buildings or trees, or in which the driver loses control of the vehicle and damages it in some other way, such as driving into a ditch or rolling over. Sometimes an accident may also refer to an Vehicle striking a human or animal. Car crashes — also called road traffic accidents (RTAs), traffic collisions, auto accidents, road accidents, personal injury collisions, motor vehicle accidents (MVAs), — kill an estimated 1.2 million people worldwide each year, and injure about forty times this number.
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