How Safe Are You? Reflections from the Systems Safety Community

Celebrating over three decades of working with safety systems, Wendy Owen, a Researcher in Fusion Energy at Bangor University, has recently co-authored a book titled “30 Years of Safer Systems”. Wendy has extensive experience in a range of highly regulated industries and is a Fellow of the Safety and Reliability Society.

The book is published by the Safety-Critical Systems Club (SCSC) , a professional society for engineers, managers and academics in the field of system safety across all industry sectors. Wendy says the book has been well-received and describes it as a “coffee table book that safety practitioners and other engineers can easily dip in and out of”. The contents are of interest to anyone seeking insights into how major industrial accidents are prevented.

Image: Front cover of the book: 30 Years of Safer Systems

In February, Wendy gave a speech at SCSC’s annual conference about the development of the book; it took the five authors a year to write, spans over 300 pages and contains 46 articles from the SCSC’s newsletters. The articles offer a broad and historical coverage of safety topics and give a unique insight into safety engineering over the last three decades, alongside positive improvements in safety over the period. The articles are grouped into themes, and notable events from the year the article was originally published are showcased, including a range of news-worthy incidents from the 10th anniversary of Chernobyl to the Salisbury rail tunnel event, which occurred just before the book was published. Most of the original authors of the articles have provided a short postscript to their article to give extra context and explain progress in the intervening years.

Wendy said, “it was a privilege to be involved in writing this mammoth publication, and it is great to see that all the net proceeds go to support ongoing activities by the SCSC”, she continued “it is available on Amazon and is a relative bargain at £25”.