How Poor Risk Assessment Turns Small Hazards Into Major Disasters

Walking through any major industrial site in Ghana whether it is a massive building project in East Legon a gold mine in Obuasi you will notice one thing the biggest tragedies rarely start with a massive explosion Instead they begin as a tiny oversight a small thing that nobody bothered to check

In our local context we often hear people say that nothing will happen or that we have been doing it this way for years without trouble While confidence is good in the world of HSE relying on luck is a dangerous gamble Disasters are not sudden acts of fate they are the logical end point of a failed risk assessment process When we treat safety checks like a boring burden or just a piece of paper to show a regulator we are essentially leaving our front door open for a disaster to walk in

The Domino Effect of Neglect

Think of a Risk Assessment like a shield If the shield has even one tiny crack the whole thing can fail when the pressure is on A small hazard like a little oil spill on a walkway or a slightly frayed wire might seem like nothing in the heat of a busy workday But when you fail to assess that risk you start a domino effect

Imagine a worker slips on that small oil spill Because the risk was not assessed there was no warning sign and no sawdust used to soak it up As he falls he reaches out to grab something for balance and accidentally pulls down a heavy tool or hits a valve that should never be turned This is how a small hazard that would have taken two minutes to clean turns into a medical emergency or a plant shutdown This is why we say that disasters are just small hazards that grew up because nobody stopped them

Why We Get It Wrong The Ghanaian Context

In many Ghanaian workplaces we face specific challenges that make our risk assessments weak One major issue is the Copy and Paste Culture Many companies simply take a risk assessment from a different project sometimes even from a different country and just change the name They do not look at the actual ground they are standing on If you use a risk assessment designed for a site in Europe while you are working in the high humidity and heat of Takoradi you are missing huge risks like heat exhaustion and equipment fatigue

Another problem is the Boss man mentality where only the managers sit in a nice air conditioned office to write the assessment The people who actually face the hazards the laborers the welders and the machine operators are often not involved If the person doing the work is not part of the assessment the document is just paper It does not reflect the real dangers on the shop floor

The Gap Between Paper and Practice

A major disaster often happens when the Risk Assessment says one thing but the site reality says another This is what we call the Paper Safety Gap You might have a beautiful document that says all workers must wear full PPE and use certified scaffolding But if the supervisor allows people to work on wooden planks with bathroom slippers because the project is running late the risk assessment has already failed

When we ignore small deviations from the plan we are teaching the system that it is okay to be unsafe In our mining and construction sectors this normalization is how we end up with catastrophic failures The disaster feels sudden but it was actually building up for months through every small hazard we ignored

How to Tighten the Shield

To stop small hazards from becoming big disasters we must change how we look at risk in Ghana

First we must make Risk Assessment a living process Before every new task there should be a Job Hazard Analysis JHA that involves everyone who will touch the tools This is not about filling a form it is about having a conversation where we ask what can kill us today and how do we stop it

Second we must look at Cumulative Risk Sometimes three small hazards together create one giant risk One small gas leak one spark from a nearby grinder and one blocked exit might be manageable on their own but together they are a bomb A good risk assessment looks at how these things interact

Final Thoughts No Hazard is Too Small

In the end every major disaster in history started as a small hazard that someone ignored or assessed poorly We must treat every spill every loose bolt and every skipped safety brief with the seriousness it deserves because we never know which one will be the trigger

Our goal in HSE is to see the disaster before it happens By doing thorough honest and inclusive risk assessments we protect our brothers and sisters on the site our equipment and the future of our industries

Would you like me to help you create a simplified 5 step Risk Assessment guide that your supervisors can use in the field without feeling overwhelmed by paperwork