Importance of Safety Engineering

SAFETY. This simple word speaks volumes and can be what stands between life and death. We all want to be safe. We feel good when we feel safe, whether it’s at home, in the streets or at work. When dealing with the subject of safety in the engineering context, we may loosely divide it into two aspects – safety at the workplace and a career as a safety engineering professional – though the two are closely interlinked. Safety engineering aims to manage risk in the workplace by eliminating or reducing it to acceptable levels. According to Wikipedia, “Risk is the combination of the probability of a failure event, and the severity resulting from the failure. For instance, the severity of a particular failure may result in fatalities, injuries, property damage, or nothing more than annoyance. It may be a frequent, occasional or a rare occurrence. The acceptability of the failure depends on to predict than severity due to the many factors that could lead to a failure, such as mechanical failure, environmental effects, and operator error”. As its name implies, safety engineering is about reducing failure or, should failure occur, minimising it so that the consequences will not be life-threatening.

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