No failure no accident in man-made disasters in construction

Abstract

Construction is an industry that carries the risk of causing human death, and the destruction of assets and the environment. Several cases such as girder collapse, crane overturning, formwork collapse, and material landslides have occurred recently in large-scale infrastructure projects in Indonesia. Currently, construction accident theory describes active and latent failures in management, and human as well as technical issues. The purpose of this paper is to propose the theory of no failure no accident in any man-made disaster. A further review of literature studies is used to outline current research findings on management, technical, and human failures leading to catastrophic events. Evidence-based reasoning from 5 cases of catastrophic events in construction is described to reveal failure modes that lead to incidents and accidents. In this paper, firstly the failure modes and their effects are described based on the literature review, and secondly, empirical evidence of failure modes is presented using selected disaster cases recorded by the Construction Safety Committee, Ministry of Public Works, and Public Housing. Finally, this paper concludes that failure modes represent the quality of systems, services, procedures, goods, and personnel that is defective to contribute to a catastrophic event that causes damage to people, the public, property, and the environment.