System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering)

While useful for engineers (particularly in the chemical processing or nuclear fields), this book is written in comprehensible terms that do not require an engineering background or technical education to understand. In fact, I believe that the biggest beneficiaries of this book are not engineers at all, but non-technical managers, who desperately need to understand safety systems, but often don't. In fact the chapter on Safety Management should be required reading for any manager in a safety critical environment, as it is an excellent "how to" guide to safety management of complex systems. This chapter has examples of correct safety management, and more importantly, excellent examples of the perils of management unwillingness to prioritize safety. The case study of the Nypro UK cyclohexane plant explosion in Flixborough, England is the best detailed, and has universal applications to safety systems across varying industries. The loss of the shuttle 'Challenger' is also reviewed from a systems safety vantage point, but while there are many errors to be analyzed and learned from there, more of the lessons are industry specific than are the lessons from the Flixborough example.

I used this book in a graduate class on systems safety. This is one of the best safety books I have seen, and is the most concise text on systems safety that I have ever read, far better, for instance, than the works of Perrow. Mr. Bahr is to be commended for his work; I look forward to reading more by him in the future.


A great textbook   September 6, 2007
S. Walter (Fort Wayne, IN)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment is an excellent reference on how to engineer safety and manage risk. The clarity of the writing combined with understandable examples makes this book an outstanding text for a course on engineering safe systems.

This book starts by introducing the need and benefits of implementing a system safety program providing context for the later material. Key safety concepts and definitions are then introduced with references to relevant government and industry standards. A pragmatic discussion follows on the necessity of management and organizational support for an effective safety program. The book then details specific techniques for hazard identification and analysis including HAZOP, fault tree, FMEA, FMECA and a few lesser known methodologies. The overview of human factors analysis begins with the observation that "human error is an out-of-tolerance action within the human machine system." This discussion provides a comprehensive framework for the more advanced material referenced in the section. The only weakness was the following section on software safety, which lacked detailed descriptions of state-of-practice analysis techniques. The analysis section is strengthened by the discussion of accident and failure reporting systems and the associated databases that are used to support accident and reliability analyses. The final chapters of the book provide a practical discussion of how to manage risk using tailored versions the various techniques introduced in the previous sections.

All in all, this is a worthwhile reference for systems engineers and safety officials.




Easy to read, informative, comprehendible.   April 27, 2009
M. Glaser (Ohio, USA)
The book is very easy reading. It has a good format and seems to have some good information. Good examples of analysis methods.