Citation

Puisa R, McNay J, Montewka J. Safety Sci. 2021; 136: e105151.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105151

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Consideration of risk treatment measures is an essential step of a risk assessment. The type of treatment, preventive or mitigative, is decided on an ad hoc basis, and there seems to be a preferential bias towards mitigation measures in the maritime domain. The paper poses the question of whether this bias is warranted. To this end, we analysed seven studies where the formal safety assessment (FSA) was applied to a variety of cargo and passenger ships. The analysis presents a qualitative review of the recommended RCOs and studies any correlation between the presented RCOs and any bias towards mitigation or prevention. The analysis concluded that any assertion that improving accident mitigation is more practical, i.e. cost-effective, than incident prevention is unwarranted. However, we also showed that the credibility of the FSA results is weak, making this conclusion rather preliminary. The results also show that the reviewed risk analyses expose a potential bias towards mitigation, and the paper discusses possible reasons for that.

Language: en

Keywords

Formal safety assessment; Hazard mitigation; Hazard prevention; Risk assessment; Risk control