Our university has
been conducting safety and health risk assessments
in accordance with the Basic Health and Safety Policy established
in 2005. In this context, a risk assessment of chemical substances
has been in place. The implementation of chemical substance risk assessment
became mandatory by Japanese law in FY 2016. At our university, the
series of safety risk assessments has totaled approximately 6,500
cases. Of these, the most common damage predicted was “Fire”
at around 16%, followed by “Burn” at about 13%, and
“Chemical burn” at approximately 11%. Of the risk assessments
in which “Fire” was the predicted damage, “Chemical
substance” was the most frequently identified hazard. Specifically,
around 40% of “Chemical substance” was “Flammable
liquid”, about 30% was “Spontaneously combustible substance
and water-prohibiting substance”, and approximately 9% was
“Other hazardous material”. It should be noted that
there was a negative association between the percentage of risk assessments
performed and the percentage of actual accidents that occurred. That
is, what is strongly recognized as a hazard in risk assessment tends
to have fewer occurrences as an actual accident cause. As a rule,
the identified hazard in the risk assessment and the main cause of
the actual accident were consistent, and the risk assessment based
on the assumption of several predictable types of damage from a single
hazard could have been directly attributed to the prevention of actual
accidents.