Mitropetros K., Gasche H.-E., 2016, History Does Not Have to Repeat Itself: 20 Years Contribution of the Online DECHEMA Incident Database, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 48, 793-798.
The value of learning from process safety accidents and incidents is unquestionable. Databases can accumulate these lessons and function as a source of collective memory on what can go wrong in safety. Although there has been a number of other incident related databases established around the world during the last decades, the DECHEMA Incident Database differs significantly from them. This is true mainly in terms of: procedures for guaranteeing standardized, high quality, usable information in the database; measures for guaranteeing anonymity to the companies that submit their internal incident reports for consideration to the database and dissemination activities, in particular within the chemical industries. The paper describes how a database can support process industries to learn from the mistakes of others by providing them a relatively low amount of high quality high relevance information. The paper then discusses how the DECHEMA Incident Database meets those requirements, its structure and its functions.
