Developing a new method for analyzing the root causes of accidents

Today, many organizations and companies have some methods and instructions to analyze the causes of accidents, but when an accident occurs, only a simple approach is implemented to analyze the causes of accidents. This study aims to investigate and identify the root causes of accidents in the country's drilling industry and provide a technique for an accurate and more comprehensive analysis of accidents with high intensity and frequency in this industry.

The present study was conducted in 4 main stages. In the first step, the lessons learned from accidents in the drilling industry were studied through the method of document review. The factors identified in the first step were weighted by the AHP-Fuzzy method and their impact on the occurrence of the accident was determined according to the expert’s opinion. One of the fatal accidents in an oil drilling company was selected and then the root causes of the accident were analyzed according to the developed model.

Based on the results of the review of documents, 29 factors including organizational, occupational, and environmental factors were identified as the root causes of accidents. Among the second level criteria, the organizational factor with the weighting load of 0.533 had the highest and the environmental criteria with the weighting load of 0.0198 gained the lowest weighting load. Based on the results, it was found that job incompetence is one of the main causes of accidents, and job incompatibility and safety training are among the second and third sub-criteria and are among the main causes of the accident.

In the present study, three factors of organization, environment, and individual based on the theory of human factors as the root causes of industrial accidents in the drilling industry were investigated. Analysis of the study data showed that the designed tool is a simple and quantitative method to find the root causes of accidents in the drilling industry and can be used as a practical and comprehensive method for analyzing organizational accidents.