Development of an industrial accident reporting system to centrally collect accident event data in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The current accident reporting systems in Sri Lanka do not cover reporting of all types of accidents. Several competent authorities are involved in collecting data on certain types of industrial accidents and those data are held by the respective authority. These include accidents involving injuries to workers, death of a worker, hazardous wastes and dangerous occurrences in the industry. Events which result in only environmental damages or near miss incidents are not reported or investigated by the current system. This paper proposes a framework for a system to report data on incidents of all types occurring in the process industry of Sri Lanka to a central collection body. It is called the 'Industrial Accident Reporting System (IARS)'. It is capable of collecting data on all types of incidents such as major accidents, accidents and near miss events. These incidents could involve dangerous substances or non-dangerous substances, fatalities or injuries to human life or damages to the environment. Further the IARS is also capable of generating accident notification forms required by the existing regulations in Sri Lanka automatically. The IARS contains three main sections. It requires the operator to enter establishment details, information on the accident and in cases where the workers are injured or a death has occurred the worker details also must be entered. The accident information is entered in two reports as a preliminary report and as a detailed description. process industry, accident notification, Sri Lanka