Health & Safety - When Doing Something, How Risky Can It Be?

Hello Steemit Community,

Have you ever wonder, how risky can an activity would be? I'm not referring to obvious activities such as swimming with sharks or cutting trees with chainsaw cause everyone is well aware on the magnitude of the danger level that those activities possessed. On this post, I would like to relate more on our daily routine activities that might not be too apparent but may be quite risky. 

WHAT IS RISK

To put in simple words, risk is how likely that a hazard will occur and how terrible will be the consequences of that hazard. It's basically a combination of likelihood and severity. If you like maths, you can simply put them in mathematical form like this:

Risk= Likelihood x Severity

or in short form:  R = L x S

Now, one might wonder what will be the numbers to put into the equations above. There is no one standard or one rule that govern this. In fact, different companies may treat it differently. For simplicity, let's give ratings for each L & S such that:

Likelihood,L

• 5: Most Likely        --> Most likely to happen
• 4: Possible              --> Has a good chance of happening & not unusual
• 3: Conceivable       --> May occur in the future based on past events
• 2: Remote               --> Has not been known to occur for a long time
• 1: Inconceivable    --> Has never occurred before 

  Severity,S

• 5: Catastrophic       --> Causing many fatalities
• 4: Fatal                     --> A single fatality  
• 3: Serious                 --> Non fatal injury or causing permanent disability
• 2: Minor                   --> Causing disabling but not permanent injury
• 1: Negligible            --> Minor abrasions, bruises, first aid injury 

Once L & S have been given ratings, Risk is then can be obtained by multiplication from L & S. Often the case, we do not stop here as there is more effective way in presenting the risk. A better way to communicate the result of risk is by displaying them in a matrix form. For our case, it will look like this:

The numbers in the green, yellow and red boxes are the risk, which is the result of multiplication of L & S. Ok wait, why there are 3 colours? This is just a method to categorise whether the risk that has been calculated is either low, medium or high. The color coding is such that:

1. Red: High Risk [requires immediate action to control the risk]
2. Yellow: Medium Risk [best to reduce the risk to low risk for best result ]
3. Green: Low Risk 

OK, enough of the theory. Lets do an example for 1 type of activity. 

Activity: Changing a light bulb at ceiling on your own by using a ladder

Hazard: Fall from high height

Likelihood: 3 (may happen)

Severity: 2 (minor injury)

Hence, the risk,R is 3 x 2 = 6.

As you can see, the risk falls within the yellow box which is a medium risk. One way to reduce the risk is by reducing the L or S. Let say we modify the activity such that you are accompanied by another person that supervise/assisting your activity (i.e- holding your ladder). In this way, the likelihood,L can be reduced,  from 3 to 2 which resulting in risk,R becoming 4 (low) instead of 6 (medium). Once risk is in low category, you will have a peace in mind when performing the activity. 

That's all from me now. Thank you for reading. 

Do let me know if there is any comment/feedback on this post.

Cheers,

@rahim.rahman