Safety engineering
Safety engineering is a specialized field focused on ensuring that engineered systems operate within safe parameters, aiming to control and eliminate risks before they manifest as hazards. This discipline is integral to product development and system design, where safety engineers assess potential dangers related to human factors, material reliability, and compliance with safety legislation. The practice involves simulating possible accidents to identify risks, allowing engineers to devise safety protocols and protective measures.
Historically, safety engineering gained prominence after tragic events, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, which highlighted the dire need for workplace safety standards. Today, safety engineers typically hold degrees in various engineering disciplines and employ critical thinking and observational skills to foresee and mitigate hazards in diverse environments, from industrial settings to consumer products. Different branches of safety engineering exist, including health and safety engineers, who focus on preventing workplace illnesses and injuries, and product engineers, who analyze and improve product safety. Systems safety engineers use a holistic approach to identify risks in complex systems, helping to ensure safety across various industries.
Safety engineering
Safety engineering is a field whereby safety professionals work to ensure that engineered systems function under acceptable levels of safety. The purpose of safety engineering is to control specific risk factors by reducing or completely eliminating them before they have an opportunity to become dangerous. Safety engineering usually starts during product development or system design. It is closely related to industrial engineering/systems engineering.
Safety engineers train by replicating possible accidents under various conditions and bringing forward the accident risks. They are then able to design safety guards or procedures the operators must follow to remain safe. Before implementing a system or producing a product, safety engineers consider all possibilities, including technical human factors, safety, reliability of material, and legislation to make sure that there is no known hazard. Currently, safety engineers use computer models or prototypes to recreate the possible hazardous situations.
Brief History
The first society or group of safety engineers in the United States was founded on October 14, 1911, in New York City as the United Association of Casualty Inspectors (ASSE). Sixty-two firefighters and rescue workers joined forces following the tragic fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on March 25, 1911, when 146 garment workers— both women and men—died. The sweat factory, flush with new immigrant workers fresh off the boats from Europe, was in the Asch building in New York City, now part of New York University.
Although the factory had fire exit doors at the time, they were either locked or opened inwards, which proved totally ineffective for workers trying to run to safety. At the time of the fire, the only safety measures available for the workers were twenty-seven buckets of water; many people died trying to escape by jumping one hundred feet out the window to the street below or jumping to their death into the elevator shaft. The firefighters that did arrive on the scene found their ladders were too short to reach the stranded workers, and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors.
The horrific fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur membership in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Women’s Trade Union League. The Illinois American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) was established in response in Park Ridge, Illinois. It is, in the twenty-first century, the country’s oldest professional safety society, representing more than thirty-seven thousand safety engineering practitioners from all over the country.
By 1914, the benefits of ASSE began to spread by word of mouth, and more states passed workers’ compensation laws, and insurance companies hired more inspectors. The safety engineering profession grew, and so did the practitioners’ commitment to increasing workplace safety resulting in an increased public awareness of occupational issues, and their impact on everyone’s quality of life.
By the beginning of World War I, the number of members swelled with workers from the steel, mining, and chemical industries and railroads joining. However, many workers joined the armed forces and were sent to fight in Europe and interest in ASSE dropped considerably.
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) covers all employers and their employees in the fifty states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other US territories. The act defines an employer as any person engaged in commerce in a business that has employees, but does not include the United States or any state or political subdivision of a state. Thereby, this act includes employees and employers in such varied fields as manufacturing, construction, agriculture, long shoring, law and medicine, disaster relief, charity, organized labor, and private education. Self-employed workers are not covered by the act.
On June 21, 2003, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), through its Technical Activities Board (TAB), voted to create a new professional society, Product Safety Engineering. TAB is the functional operations unit that oversees activities of all societies and councils, including division directors and liaisons from other entities within IEEE.
Safety Engineering Today
Safety engineers today must have a bachelor’s degree typically in engineering, including chemical, electrical, mechanical, industrial, or systems engineering. Occupational or industrial hygiene are also acceptable fields of study.
Despite the need for a degree, most states in the United States do not require health and safety engineers to be licensed. Licensure is generally advised for those opting for a career in systems safety engineering, but many safety and hazard engineers are not licensed. Licensed engineers are called professional engineers (PEs).
Critical-thinking skills are vital for safety engineers as they must be able to identify potential problems and hazards before they cause damage or become a health threat. They must be able to sense hazards to humans and property long before they occur in the workplace or in the home.
Safety engineers must have keen observational skills and possess the ability to think in terms of overall processes within an organization by observing the individual functions and seeing them as parts of the risk or danger.
Without the expertise to problem solve, the safety engineer would be unable to design solutions for entire organizational operations by taking into account processes from more than one system at the same time.
Under the title of safety engineer, there are several subdivisions and combinations. Health and safety engineers focus on developing procedures and design systems to prevent people from getting sick or injured and to keep property from being damaged. They combine knowledge of systems engineering and health or safety to make sure that chemicals, machinery, software, furniture, and consumer products will not cause harm to people or buildings. They are involved mainly in industrial and occupational hygiene, which focuses on the effects of chemical, physical, and biological agents.
In general, health engineers investigate work environments and recommend changes to keep workers from being exposed to sickness or injuries. An example of this service would be to recommend a reduced noise level in a factory if the current volume is likely to cause harm to workers’ hearing.
Another type of safety engineer is the product engineer. Product engineers investigate the causes of accidents or injuries that might have resulted from the use or misuse of a product and make recommendations on how to solve the problem. They may also participate in the design phase of new products to prevent injuries, illnesses, or property damage that could occur with the use of the product.
Systems safety engineers are professionals that work in aerospace, software safety, medical safety, and environmental safety. These engineers use a highly systemic approach to identify hazards so that accidents and injuries can be avoided.
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