In this age of safety awareness, technological emergencies still happen,
occasionally with catastrophic results. Often human intervention is the only way of
averting disaster. Ensuring that the chosen emergency managers are competent requires a
combination of training and assessmentH. owever, assessmenct urrently relies on expert
judgement of behaviour as opposed to its impact on outcome, therefore it would be
difficult to incorporate such data into formal Quantitative Risk Assessments (QRA).
Although there is, as yet, no suitable alternative to expert judgement, there is a
need for methods of quantifying the impact of emergency management on risk reduction
in accident and incidents.
The Task Performance Resource Constraint (TPRC) model is capable of
representing the critical factors. It calculates probability of task success with respect to
time based on uncertainties associated with the task and resource variables. The results
can then be used to assess the management performance based on the physical outcome
in the emergency, thereby providing a measure of the impact of emergency management
on risk with a high degree of objectivity.
Data obtained from training exercises for offshore and onshore emergency
management were measured and successfully used with the TPRC model. The resulting
probability of success functions also demonstrated a high level of external validity when
used with improvements in emergency management or design changes or real data from
the Piper Alpha disaster. It also appeared to have more external validity than other
HRQ/QRA techniques as it uses physical data that are a greater influence on outcome
than psychological changes - though this could be because the current HRA/QRA
techniques view human unreliability as probability of error rather than probability of
failure. The simulation data were also used to build up distributions of timings for simple
emergency management tasks. Using additional theoretical data, this demonstrated the
model's potential for assessing the probability of successf or novel situations and future
designs