Incident Reporting - Learning From Experience-Paper

Experience makes a superior teacher. Sharing the details surrounding safety events is one of the bestways to help prevent their recurrence elsewhere. This approach requires an open, non-punitiveenvironment to achieve broad benefits. The Hydrogen Incident Reporting Tool(www.h2incidents.org) is intended to facilitate the sharing of lessons learned and other relevantinformation gained from actual experiences using and working with hydrogen and hydrogen systems.Its intended audience includes those involved in virtually any aspect of hydrogen technology, systemsand use, with an emphasis towards energy and transportation applications. The database containsrecords of safety events both publicly available and/or voluntarily submitted. Typical records contain ageneral description of the occurrence, contributing factors, equipment involved, and some detailing ofconsequences and changes that have been subsequently implemented to prevent recurrence of similarevents in the future. The voluntary and confidential nature and other characteristics surrounding thedatabase mean that any analysis of apparent trends in its contents cannot be considered statisticallyvalid for a universal population. A large portion of reported incidents have occurred in a laboratorysetting due to the typical background of the reporting projects, for example. Yet some interestingtrends are becoming apparent even at this early stage of the database?s existence and general lessonscan already be taken away from these experiences. This paper discusses the database and a few trendsthat have already become apparent for the reported incidents. Anticipated future uses of thisinformation are also described. This paper is intended to encourage wider participation and usage ofthe incidents reporting database and to promote the safety benefits offered by its contents.