Health and safety risk assessment in civil engineering projects Essay

Health and safety risk assessment in civil engineering projects - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that the welfare of people operating or working within the confines of any manufacturing or engineering environment is of main importance. Every worker should expect to be capable of carrying out their task in a safe manner that has no negative effect on their health and wellbeing. In fact, many organizations not only reduce risks and make improvements to the working environment but try to make their own working environment superior to others, making it a competitive aspect when recruiting staff. Health and safety in the field are about measures designed to protect the health and safety of workers, visitors and the general public who may be affected by workplace activities. Safety measures about controlling and reducing risks to anyone who might be affected by these activities. Health and safety are controlled largely by legislation and regulations and the law is continually being revised and updated. It is important that organizations are aware of these changes and keep up to date with developments. This unit provides an understanding of hazards and risks associated with health, safety, and welfare in an engineering workplace. Learners will develop an understanding of the requirements of health, safety and welfare legislation and regulations and of their roles in complying with the related legal obligations. Ideally, this unit would form a key component of the program, as the content is applicable to many engineering situations. Learners will be required to undertake full risk assessments and to appreciate the significant risks encountered in the workplace and the measures taken to deal with them (Melchers, 2002). They will also study the principles of reporting and recording accidents and incidents, again within a legal context. The main aim in civil engineering is to manage risk, eliminating or reducing it to acceptable levels (Melchers, 2002). Risk is the combination of the possibility of a failure event, and the risks resulting from the failure. For example, the extent of a particular failure may result in risks fatalities, injuries, property damage, or nothing more than annoyance. It may be regular, occasional, or rare happenings. The acceptability of the failure depends on the combination of the two. Probability is often more difficult to predict than severity due to the many things that could cause a failure, such as mechanical failure, environmental effects, and operator error. Any specialist in the field should be able to assess and comprehensively report on any environmental principle, from aquatic to marine science, air, soil, geology, geo-hydrology, archaeology, ecology, rehabilitation, or any such science connected to the environment. Safety engineering tries to lower the occurrence of failures, and make sure that when failures do happen, the results are not life-threatening. For instance, bridges are designed to carry loads well in excess of the heaviest truck likely to use them. This reduces the possibility of being overloaded. Most bridges are designed with back up load paths, so that if any one structural member fails, the structure will remain standing. This reduces the severity if the bridge happens to be overloaded. Safety should starts during the early design of a system. Engineers should consider what bad events can happen under what conditions, and predict the related accident risk. They should propose safety mitigation requirements in specifications at the start of development or changes to existing designs to make a system safer. These may be done by fully getting rid of any type of hazards or by lowering accident risk. More often, instead of engineers influencing the design, they should prove that an existing, completed design is safe. If the engineer discovers significant safety problems late in the development process, correcting them can be very costly (Great Britain, 2003). This type of error has the potential to waste large sums of money and likely more important, human