Prevention of accidents in facilities for the treatment and storage of selected agricultural products

Abstract

Process safety in the storage and processing of agricultural products is an important aspect related not only to reducing the risk of damage to the human health or property, but is also strategical to national food safety. A special emphasis must therefore be placed on risk assessment of the operation of these facilities. One of the cornerstones of the risk assessment process is the use of knowledge of past accidents. As the agricultural industry is rather marginal in the field of safety engineering compared to other sectors of the economy, available publications dealing with this topic are rather an exception. The aim of this paper is to conduct research on the available information on accidents that have occurred in agricultural processing and storage facilities in the past. The purpose is to provide professionals and operators with a comprehensive source of information useful for activities related to the prevention of these accidents. The output of the work is then a previously unrealised representative database of systematically sorted information on accidents that have occurred in the process of treatment or storage of agricultural products. This information was subsequently analysed and evaluated. The created database consists of 195 records of accidents that occurred between 1989 and 2018. To create a unique representative database, mainly publicly available databases of industrial accidents or professional publications were used. The author's database contains information on accident locations, accident causes and accident prevention measures. A total of 21 persons died and 32 persons were injured during the accidents. The analysis shows that fires are the most frequent manifestation of accidents (86%) and accidents in material handling facilities are the most frequent (33%). According to the information available in the database, organisational factors were identified as the most frequent causative factors of accidents (47%). For a better understanding of the accident process, a description of selected accident scenarios was also provided in the work. A linear model was used for this purpose. Due to the strategic importance of the evaluated facilities for processing and storage of agricultural products, efforts are made to prevent accidents from recurring or to reduce their impact on the surrounding area. Therefore, an integral part of the work is the description of possible measures against the recurrence of similar accidents.