100 Causes of workplace accidents. Engineering controls deal directly with the hazard by removing it, ventilating it, suppressing it, or otherwise rendering the workplace safe and healthful. The drawback of large safety factors must be weighed against the consequences of system failure, in order to arrive at a rational decision. The resulting status of a system, in event of failure of one or its components, shall be in a safe mode. Design engineers need to consider the general fail-safe principle so as to ensure that a failure within the system will result in a safe mode.
Engineers back up primary subsystems with standby units.
The concept of defensive driving is well known to all drivers and serves to explain the principle of worst case. The most obvious example is the removal of guards from machines. Some machine guards are so impractical that they conjure up doubts about the motives of the equipment manufacturer. Form of review of mishaps that have actually occurred. Accident analysis is not used nearly enough to assist in the other approaches to hazard avoidance.