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Oct 1, 2011 · Heinrich's most famous theories include unsafe acts of persons are responsible for most accidents and the 300-29-1 ratio of workplace accidents. Critics claim that adhering to the Heinrich model can lead to an over-emphasis on worker behavior and not enough attention on systems.
Jul 1, 2017 · Heinrich is most famous for originating the concept of the “ safety pyramid ”. He also developed the “five domino model” of accident causation, a sequential accident model which has been influential in the development of occupational safety thinking. His “domino theory” represents an accident sequence as a causal chain of events ...
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The accident triangle, also known as Heinrich's triangle or Bird's triangle, is a theory of industrial accident prevention. It shows a relationship between serious accidents, minor accidents and near misses.
Mar 30, 2011 · According to W.H. Heinrich (1931), who developed the so-called domino theory, 88% of all accidents are caused by unsafe acts of people, 10% by unsafe actions and 2% by “acts of God”. He proposed a “five-factor accident sequence” in which each factor would actuate the next step in the manner of toppling dominoes lined up in a row.
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The work was pursued and disseminated in the 1970s by Frank E. Bird, who worked for the Insurance Company of North America. F. Bird analyzed more than 1.7 million accidents reported by 297 cooperating companies. These companies represented 21 different industrial groups, employing 1.7 million employees who worked over 3 billion hours during the exp...
The most famous result is the incident/accident pyramid, also known as the safety pyramid or the accident triangle. The pyramid, as illustrated by Heinrich in his 1931 book, is shown below.
This work suggested that the ratio between fatal accidents, accidents, injuries and minor incidents (often reported as 1-10-30-600, and sometimes called Heinrichs Law or the Heinrich ratio) is relatively constant, over time and across companies. Note that these numbers refer to accidents that were reported to the insurance company and incidents dis...
Heinrichs work was pioneering in analyzing the causal factors that led to workplace accidents, highlighting the associated costs and encouraging managers to think about and invest in prevention of occupational accidents (interrupting an accident sequence). However, some of these findings on causality were affected by biases.
One conclusion of Heinrichs work is that 95% of workplace accidents are caused by unsafe acts. Heinrich came to this conclusion after reviewing thousands of accident reports completed by supervisors, and interviewing these supervisors as much as ten years after the relevant incidents. These supervisors are likely to often have blamed workers for ca...
Another disputed finding in Heinrich and Birds work concerns the causality of minor incidents and of major accidents. Heinrich stated that:
This is incorrect in high-hazard industry today, and can lead to inappropriate allocation of resources. In particular, it leads some companies to an excessive focus on behavioural safety, workplace housekeeping and the prevention of low-consequence incidents such as slips and falls, to the detriment of investment in maintenance and technical and or...
Accident causality is often more complicated than Heinrichs quote suggests, as indicated by the following extract from the BP report into the Deepwater Horizon accident:
While this mental image is positive in helping prevent occupational accidents (and is clearly very sticky in peoples minds), it is often misinterpreted in ways that reduce attention paid to major accident hazards. One common misinterpretation is frequency reduction will trigger a severity reduction. This is a structuralist view of the Heinrich pyra...
The attraction to Heinrich’s theory is its assumed “ease of use” with the general perception that one need only know the number of lower severity injuries or illnesses to make predictions about higher severity events.
Dec 31, 2015 · Heinrich’s (1950) theory explains accidents using the analogy of dominos falling over one another and creating a chain of events. While this theory is not the most advanced or
