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Introduction
The work of U.K. safety specialist, writer and teacher Trevor Kletz has been pioneering and influential internationally, including in the United States. The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Kletz's achievements in both industry and academia, provide an insight into the career that supported these accomplishments and further disseminate and publicize his ideas and themes, which offer important routes to improved system safety.
Figure 1 — Trevor Kletz.
Achievements
Trevor Kletz spent his entire industrial career at Imperial Chemicals Industries (ICI), a major U.K. company. During his last 14 years with the organization, from 1968 to 1982, he worked as safety advisor to the petrochemicals division, concentrating on technical accidents, mainly fires and explosions. Figure 2 shows how ICI's fatal accident rate fell during the period Kletz worked in the process safety field. While others were concerned with the same goal, the reduction in the fatal accident rate from the late 1960s onward gives an indication of Kletz's impact and the value of the approaches he used and introduced to his colleagues.
Figure 2 — ICI's Fatal Accident Rate (The Number of Fatal Accidents in 108 Working Hours or in a Group of 1,000 People in a Working Lifetime) Expressed as a Five-Year Moving Average.)
While working in industry and academia, Trevor Kletz contributed to the development and promotion of important new philosophies and techniques in process safety, including inherently safer design, HAZOP, HAZAN and prevention of accidents associated with human error. Known as an effective communicator, he has published 11 books, more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and a great many short pieces on loss prevention and process safety. His best-selling book, What Went Wrong [Ref. 1], currently in its fourth edition with a fifth in preparation, has sold more than 20,000 copies. In it, numerous accident case histories are examined to determine what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how similar tragedies could be prevented. Kletz has lectured at a large number of organizations around the world. In the U.K., he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Chemical Engineers and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In the U.S., he is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He is the recipient of several awards and honors by industry and academia. In 1997, he was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for achievement and exceptional service in the United Kingdom.
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