Understanding industrial accidents associated with new technologies: A human resources management approach

The introduction of new technology into existing industries makes unusual demands upon human resources. If these demands are not met, these indus tries can become more accident-prone than they were prior to the introduction of the new technology. In order to identify the human resource needs related to accidents, a diagnostic framework for screening the events preceding accidents is developed. When applied to an accident, the framework generates a subset of events directly related to the accident and expresses these events in terms of human resource activity, in contrast to other approaches which have focused on more conventional equipment or system failure. The framework is illus trated with three commonly known accidents that occurred in the context of new technology. Once the subset of events is obtained by applying the frame work, human resource problems are identified for those events, and some so lutions to the problems are suggested. The human resource problems and so lutions particularly emphasized pertain to training and design of the work routine to avoid vulnerable periods in the work cycle.