Understanding and dealing with human error in the oil, gas and chemical industries

The human-system interface should be designed to take into account the limitations and capabilities of operators, otherwise the system encourages the operator to make errors. Its has been estimated that human error is the cause of 80-90% of the major incidents in the process industry and that the majority of these are due to inadequacies in the human-system interface. This paper reviews the common classifications of human error, the typical types of errors that operators make in the oil, chemical and gas industry, provides field examples of each type of error and suggests ways of modifying the equipment, work process and/or management systems to substantially reduce or even eliminate the potential for error occurring.