New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
The right way, and the wrong way, to deal with near misses
23/4/2025
8 min read
Feature
If industrial accidents were a scientific experiment, near misses would be the control case. They can offer useful insights, but also impose challenges of their own. New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple speaks with four health and safety experts to provide a guide to near misses, as interpreted by the Tripod Lite accident investigation methodology.
One theory of how accidents happen is called the ‘Swiss Cheese model’, because it conceptualises safety systems as slices of the holey dairy product interposed between a hazard and a situation. Hazards exist everywhere, but working safety systems block them, so preventing incidents and accidents. Each safety system is different, and thus each has a unique configuration of holes. If, when all the slices of cheese are lined up, the holes align, then the hazard can get through the barriers and cause an incident.
This theory came out of research from Shell International and the universities of Manchester (UK) and Leiden (Netherlands) in the 1980s and 1990s, and led to the accident investigation technique called Tripod, which is co-administered by the Energy Institute and the Stichting Tripod Foundation. It is so named because of the three elements of each incident: the event, the person or thing, and the driving force that acts on them.
Many jurisdictions require by law that companies report accidents on the job which cause injuries, and companies record and report serious injuries and fatalities. An important tool in accident reporting involves also recording accidents that don’t happen.