Occupational Health and Safety Books

Steve's Hazwoper book is amoung the best in the field. I highly recommend it for teaching high level hazwoper OSHA 40 hour course. I'm considering using it to teach at the State Univeristy of New York at Stony Brook.

Healthy Work is a classic--though currently under-appreciated--work on organizations. It is a book of great breadth and richness that deserves more than one reading. Healthy Work is a "must read" for those concerned with creating healthy organizations. It describes the demand-control model, which has had a huge influence on research on work and health. The model was prompted by Karasek's concern about the consequences of demand-control imbalances in the workplace. Karasek and Theorell provide a vision of humane organizations in which employees can master challenges and experience personal growth. Healthy Work is not an easy read, but it is a "must read" for OD practitioners, OB professors, and those concerned with improving life in organizations. It challenges us to improve the "psychic prisons" in which many employees--unfortunately--spend much of their waking hours.

A gripping true life story of a commercial airline been hijacked, a resulting crash in the Indian Ocean and the authors' will to survive to tell the story.

Risk communication used to mean one way messages from experts to non-experts. But today's issues are not only technically complex, they are politically charged. Experts are often seen as advocates for a particular position, eroding credibility. There is a better way. This book is the result of the National Research Council's report on "Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process."

Although the title indicates that this book is designed for the industrial arena, I found it just as applicable to healthcare organizations as well. It is easy to follow, provides excellent checklists and descriptions and very good explanations. In addition, it provides other resources to use for emergency planning. The terminology fits virtually all businesses, even though the term "plant" is used throughout. It has become the basis for the rewrite of the emergency managemement plan at my hospital. Of the many books I've reviewed, this stands at the top on emergency planning.

I have used this book as a text for a university Toxicology course for Safety Engineering Technology. It is a wonderful guide to the scientific basis of toxicology in the workplace. It is a level above the basic information and would be a wonderful reference for the safety professional who needs to solve problems and needs to determine when to bring a specialist into the worksite. It covers the applied (rather than theoretical) science, toxic agents and their manifestations, and evaluation and control of hazards in industrial workplaces.

This book is part of ISA's (formerly "The Instrument Society of America", later "The International Society for Measurement and Control" and now known as "The Instrument, Systems and Automation Society") Independent Learning Modules on Fundamental Instruments and Techniques

This book is designed to be useful to any person who desires to become conversant with the subject. No prior background in intrinsic safety is presumed. Rather the principles of area classification, hazard reduction, and electrical ignition are presented so that any interested individual may begin study without reference to other sources.

This textbook is designed for independent study. It is designed to be useful to salesmen, managers, and supervisors who need only an overview of the subject, as well as for engineers and technicians whose objective is understanding in-depth sufficient to apply this important safety technique.

Emphasis on this book is on useful information. Theory is presented only to the extent that certain principles must be understood to use intrinsic safety. No mathematical skills are required, beyond simple ohm's law calculations, to read this book.

The book is organized as follows:
- Introduction and overview.
- Area clasiication.
- Principles of hazard reduction.
- Ignition of gases and vapors by electrical means, Ideal conditions.
- Ignition of gases and vapors by electrical means, low voltage.
- Principles and standards of intrinsic safety.
- Design of intrinsically safe systems by the manufacturer.
- Intrinsically safe system design by the user.
- Certifying agencies and the certification process.
- Installation.
- Inspection and maintenance.
- Dust hazards.
APPENDICES:
- Frequently used acronyms.
- Commonly referenced standards.
- Suggested readings and study materials.
- Solutions to all exercises.

If you are interested in a more in-depht may want to consider "Electrical Instruments in Hazardous Locations" by Ernest C. Magison.

I am an Industrial Practitioner of Process Measurement & Control who has been working in the Oil & Gas Industry for more than 16 years as an Automation, Instrumentation, Process Safety and Process Control Engineer. I found this book to be an unvaluable reference in my day-to-day work, being also an excellent refresher on electrical safety.

The link between improving safety and corporate culture is made very clearly in this latest work. The behaviours of management are stressed as a major influence on culture and hence safety. A welcome addition.

[previously : Didier Bizzarri (D.Bizzarri@ulg.ac.be) (Liège, Belgium, Europe)]

I am surprised to see so few reviews for T.A.Kletz books.

If you are dealing with potentially hazardous installations or systems, and not only if you are an engineer, you should read some Kletz. Allways hinging his books around his very message, T.A.Kletz constantly gives interesting practical examples and fine advice, from his 40 years own experience. He 'dismounts' accidents, their causes, superficial and underlying down to the detail. He shows the different aspects of human/organisational responsibility in accidents and their prevention. After going through one of his books, "human error" never reads the same again. In "Learning from Accidents", he does follow that methodology for about ten famous accidents, various generic accidents and many incidents. He shows how major accidents come out of sequences of minor defficiencies and are helped by sleeping faults, poor management, poor procedures, poor incident reporting,... poor design... and poor remembrance of previous accidents/incidents.

If we don't learn from our mistakes, why bother making them?

;)

This book is certainly one of the most difficult to get your hands on - I was lucky enough to find a copy that had been decommissioned by a Battelle Institute library. The Pergamon series "Collection Futuribles" is a fitting description, although the publisher probably had a different meaning in mind back in 1982...

Lagadec summarises major technological risk, using an interesting style that suffers a little from translation. The book is nevertheless one of the first works to methodically address risk management, technology, and (by now) well-known phenomena occurring in a crisis situation. For the academic researcher, it is a prerequisite to understanding Lagadec's later research on tech. risk and specifics.

The case studies provide interesting insights on many events that we may vaguely remember, and the author does manage to bring them to life in his account of disasters and details, without ever being boring. Having said this, it is not an easy read, and some of the diagrams require detailed technical understanding.

If you ever manage to get hold of a copy - just buy it, it's worth it.