More traditional approaches to accident reporting and analysis have received much critisism in recent years. The dispute apparently lies in their inability to facilitate intervention development due to a primary non-ergonomic orientation as well as limited suitability as an information management system. Laughery, Petree, Schmidt, Schwartz, Walsh and Imig (1983) in an effort to address these issues adopted the human factors based scenario and analytic technique developed by Drury and Brill (1983) and devised a accident coding and analysis system. In an study of 1,694 operator cases taken over a three year period at a petrochemical facility in the Houston, TX area, five separate accident patterns accounting for 80% of all the reported cases were found. The scenarios are as follows: 1) muscular/skeletal strain in system operation. 2) chemical release due to system breakdown. 3) obstruction in the workspace. 4) unsolicited interface movement during system operation. 5) poor footing in the workspace. A closer analysis of each scenario revealed apparent design flaws and managerial policy problems, that if corrected would reduce incident numbers significantly.
