Domino Theory Of Accident Analysis

4.1.1 What is accident?

When we talk about work-related issues, we cannot go far from accident and incident that will result in any injury, materials, environment or property damage and incidents that have a high potential for the aforementioned report to Department of Health and Safety or Human Resource in any company. All the accidents and incidents should be investigate in order to identify the facts, determine the underlying or root cause(s), implement corrective action, and communication to tough lesson learned.

Going deep to the core, the definition of accident and incident need to be declare so that it can be classified correctly. An accident is actually the undesired event resulting in death or harm people, damage to property or loss

Investigator need to identify the causes of accident occur so that the identification of what type of failure or errors generally cause that accident and applying the correct action on the failure.

In 1931, the late H.W. Heinrich (Heinrich et al, 1980 ) presented a set of theorems known as ‘the axioms of industrial safety’. The first axiom dealt with accident causation, stating that ‘the occurrence of an injury invariably results from a complicated sequence of factors, the last one of which being the accident itself.’ Then, he presented a model known as the ‘domino theory’ as this accident sequence was likened to a row of dominoes knocking each other down in a row. The sequence is:-

i. Injury, caused by

Accident, due to an; iii. Unsafe act and/or mechanical or physical hazard, due to the; iv. Fault of the Person, caused by their;

v. Ancestry and Social Environment.

Avoiding an accident can be done by removing one of the dominoes which is the unsafe act. This theory also provides the foundation for accident prevention with aimed to prevent the unsafe acts and condition.

This theory then starts to be update by the other person so that can meet the need of OSH. The first update of the Domino Theory was presented by Bird & Loftus [ Heinrich et al, 1980; Bird & Germain, 1986 ]. This update introduced two new concepts;

i. The influence of management and managerial error; ii. Loss, as the result of an accident could be production losses, property damage or wastage of other assets, as well as injuries.

Then, it had been realize that the domino model has been noted as a one-dimensional sequence of events. Usually, an accident consists of multi-factored and develops through sequences of changes and errors also known as the principle of multiple causation. According to Peterson (1978), behind every accident there lies many contributing factors, causes and sub-causes. as the effect of multiple causations is a combination of both theories, then there is a need to identify as many of causes as