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Boy found dead in hole

IPOH: An eight-year-old boy was found dead in a hole filled with about three metres of water at a construction site near his house in Taman Mutiara, Chemor on Sunday. S. Thinish Nair's body was found in the hole at SRJK (C) Fei Cheng, which is under construction, by family members at about 6pm after his slippers were seen floating in the water. His uncle, V. Sritheran, 34, said the hole, about two metres in diameter and 3.5m deep, was dug by the contractors on Saturday. He said Thinish, a Year Two student of SK Haji Mahmud, Chemor, had gone out to play at about 5.30pm"Nobody knows how he fell into the hole but we are going to take legal action against the contractor for not fencing up the construction site. "He should have barricaded the construction site as many children play near it everyday," he said, adding that the authorities should look into the matter before more lives were lost. Sritheran said construction work on the school had been going on for the past two years. He said there were about 300 residents at the three housing estates nearby. He added that a police report had been lodged on the incident. Thinish's father R. Sugumaran and mother V. Malukutty were too distraught to be interviewed. A spokesman for the Department of Occupational Safety and Health said that generally, a contractor had to ensure the safety of the public. He added that the department would investigate the incident. Datuk Bandar Datuk Taalat Hussain said the project was approved on Oct 22, 1998. He said the permit for construction had to be renewed annually. "We are checking whether the contractor had renewed the permit," he said. Talaat said under the law, the contractor must erect a wooden hoarding or a fence at the project site to ensure public safety at all times.
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THE ENGINEERS RESPONSIBILITY FOR SAFETY

Safety and Risk We demand safe products and services because we do not wish to be threatened by potential harm, but we realise that we may have to pay for this safety. To complicate matters, what may be safe enough for one person may be not for someone else, e.g: a scissors in the hands of a child will never be as safe as it can be in the hands of an adult or a sick or small baby is more prone to suffer ill from air pollution than is a healthy adult. Absolute safety, in the senses of: a) entirely risk-free activities and product or b) a degree of safety that satisfies all individual groups under The Concept of Safety A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable. William W. Lowrance
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Risks A risk is the potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur. Risk is like harm, is a broad concept covering many different types of unwanted occurrences. In regard to technology, it can equally well include dangers of bodily harm. Of economic loss, or environmental degradation.These in turn can be caused by delayed job completion, faulty products or systems, and economically or environmentally injurious solutions to technological problems. Good engineering practice has always been concerned with safety. But as technologys influence on society has grown, so has public concern about technological risks increased. New risks are new only in the sense that: 1. They are now identifiable 2. The publics perception of them has changed Meanwhile, natural hazards continue to threaten human populations, technology has greatly reduced the scoped of some of these, such as floods or typhoon, but at the same time it has increased our vulnerability to other natural hazards, such as earthquake, flash flood, land-slides as they affect our ever-greater concentrations of population and cause greater damage to our finely tuned technological networks of long lifelines for water, energy, and food.
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Acceptability of Risk
William D. Rowe says that a risk is acceptable when those affected are generally no longer (or not) apprehensive about it.
This is influenced by such factors as whether the risk is assumed voluntarily, the effects of knowledge on how the probabilities of harm are perceived, job related or other pressures that cause people to be aware of or to overlook risks, the immediacy or obviousness of a risky activity or situation, and the identification of potential victims.

Assessment of Safety and Risk

Most think that experience and historical data would provide good information about the safety of standard products. Much has been collected and published; gaps remain, however, because: 1. There are some industries where information is not freely shared, and 2. There are always new applications of old technology that render the available information is less useful. Too many companies believe that releasing technical information might hurt their competitive position, if not place them at a disadvantage of litigation.
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Assessment of Safety and Risk For engineers, assessing safety is a complex matter. 1 The risks connected to a project or product must be identified. This requires foreseeing both intended and unintended interactions between individuals or groups and machines or systems. 2. The purpose of the project or product must be identified and ranked in importance. 3. The costs of reducing risks must be estimated. 4. The costs must be weighed against both organisational goals (profit, reputation for quality, avoiding lawsuits) and degrees of acceptability of risks to clients and public. 5. The project must be tested and then either carried out or manufactured.

Uncertainties in Design
Risk is seldom intentionally designed into a product.It arises because of the many uncertainties faced by the design engineer, the manufacturing engineer, and even the sales and applications engineer.
Regarding applications, designs that do quite well under static loads may fail under dynamic loading. Apart from uncertainties about applications of a product, there are uncertainties regarding the materials of which it is made and the level of skill that goes into designing and manufacturing it. Engineers traditionally have coped with such uncertainties about materials or components, as well as incomplete knowledge about the actual operating condition of their product, by introducing a comfortable factor of safety. The factor is intended to protect against problems arising when the stresses due to anticipated loads (duty) and the stresses the product are designed is supposed to withstand (strength and capability) depart from their expected values. A product may be said to be safe if its capability exceeds its duty. In reality the stress calculated by the engineer for a given condition of loading and the stress which ultimately at that loading may vary quite a bit. This is because each component in an assembly has been allowed certain tolerances in its physical dimensions and properties. 7

Testing for safety

The widely proclaimed safety factor has been shown to have some serious conceptual flaws. How can engineer ensure safety? Relying on experience may be one of the solution but experience gained by one engineer is all too often not passed on to others, especially embarrassing professionally ones. Bad news travels fast but without hard facts. Another way of gaining experience is through tests. Under certain condition such as testing of materials or a product is carried out to destruction. There are also test been carried out after real accidents had occurred. Normally, we call it post-mortem test. Nowadays, structural engineers usually test an entire airframe for fatigue, often one of the production models. Even prototype and routine quality assurance tests are frequently not carried out properly. Some have committed fraud in the testing of their products, omitted certain tests, falsifying data, using bogus part or lower quality product etc. Therefore testing procedures cannot be trusted uncritically. Failure to comply may be caused by time pressure, boredom of routine work, pressure from management, different environment etc.
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When Testing is Inappropriate

Not all products can be tested to destruction. In such cases a simulation that traces the outcome of one or more hypothetical, risky events should be applied. There are several approaches:

a) Scenario analysis - starts from a given event, then studies the different consequences that might evolve from it.
b) Failure modes and effects analysis - systematically examines the failure modes of each component, without, however, focussing on causes or relationships among the elements of a complex system. c) Fault-tree analysis - it proposes a system failure and then traces the event back to possible causes at the component level. d) Event-tree analysis - reverse of the fault-tree analysis, which is more mathematically oriented version of scenario analysis.

Personal Risk
Given sufficient information, an individual is able to decide whether to participate (or consent to exposure to ) a risky activity or experiment. Chauncey Starr has prepared some widely used figures that indicate that individuals are more ready to assume voluntary risks than they are to be subjected to involuntary risks (or activities over which they have no control) even when the voluntary risks are 1000 times more likely to produce a fatality than the involuntary ones. Liability Engineers and students of engineering need to be aware of strict liability.Strict liability means it is sufficient for a product as sold to have been defective for the manufacturer to be held liable for any harm that results to users. Negligence is not at issue. What matters is that the product had a defect not obvious to users. The warranty established by advertising, labels, and other information that causes the buyer to expect a serviceable and safe product.

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Liability
Engineers can also be sued individually, even when acting according to guidelines set by their employers. This may happen when an injured party is frustrated by laws that shield the employer or limit the employers liability, as is the case with government agencies. Safe Exit It is also impossible to build a completely safe product or one that will never fail. The best one can do is to assure that when a product fails it will safely, can be abandoned safely, or that the user can safely escape the product. These three condition are referred as safe exit. For example ships need lifeboats with sufficient spaces for all the passengers and crew members. Building need fire escapes, and sprinkles. Back-up system for computer base data etc.
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