>I have yet to come across a major disaster that didn't happen in a lab where the safety culture was already lousy. The Sheri Sangji atrocity is the best known, but there are many others. So, I am going to guess that this was the same in this situation?

Not necessarily. The lab involved in the total loss fire I referred to recently had the most safety conscious culture of any I have worked with. This was because lab hygiene was critical to the science they were doing. However, the fire occurred in their fume hood and the entire lab was lost despite a high level of safety and hygiene awareness.

This connection between culture and major disasters sounds similar to Heinrich's triangle which, while intuitive based on day to day life, is not well supported by data that have investigated real life major disasters. And I will say that “safety culture” is increasingly common in the mainstream media over the last 3 years and really took off after the East Palestine derailment, but this attribution is often a significant over-simplification of the ground situation and blames a lot of people with little or no role in the development of the incident.

Wikipedia has a discussion of the challenges that Heinrich's triangle presents in specific situations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_triangle

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org

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