Journal of Safety and Environment

This paper is focused on the study of the accidental common causes leading to accidents and the corresponding accident prevention strategy. At the very beginning of this paper, the authors introduces a few basic principles for safety science proposed by Heinrich and other safety scientists, (i.e.,) all the accidents have their own leading factors, which may be either the unsafe conditions or unsafe behaviors or the both. And the frequency of the accidents changes with its severity within an “accident triangle”. The first aim of this paper is to find all the common factors leading to the accidents. According to the basic principles, the author has categorized analytically and statistically all the factors discovered into 10 major classes as to the gas explosion accidents that have occurred in China's mines during 20002001. Then, we conclude that worker's unsafe working habits have been the main cause for the accidents. Then the authors examined a medical accident that was caused by spoiling children and a severe food poisoning involving 367 students, and the other two accidents caused due to the lack of safety knowledge and safety awareness. Based on the above statistics, the authors summarized all the common factors leading to the various accidents, which can be sequentially ordered as unsafe habit, lack of safety knowledge and safety awareness. Among the three, unsafe condition or unsafe behavior can be put together as one, with the other two being different by nature. As to the second aim of this paper, the author categorized a 3-level factor, that is, the safety management frame, the safety climate survey, and the behavior-based safety programs in the across-industry accident prevention map. And finally, the authors introduced some leading edge progress of the key elements in the prevention map in practical cases, such as Wilton-Olefines case and DuPont case for reader's information. The most important conclusion of this paper is that all the accidents share common factors. To fight against all the accidents, a common prevention strategy (map) can be developed with the key elements of the map developed and supplied by reference to that popularly used in some European and North American countries.