School Fire Safety - Risk Assessment - Statistics Project Example

The paper “School Fire Safety - Risk Assessment” is a brilliant example of an engineering and construction statistics project. Without a doubt, fire is dangerous to humans. With a view to minimizing injuries and fatalities, researchers have identified many of the so-called ‘risk factors’ significantly associated with school fires (see below). However, as the work in this journal exemplifies, the relationship between accumulated knowledge of risk factors and improved safety is a complicated one. For example, to assume that a fire-safe home is simply one whereas many of the risk factors as possible have been identified and eliminated is misguided, as risk factors are probabilistic in nature (Green, 1997; Hacking, 1990), and ‘risk’ itself is a ‘simplifying heuristic’ (Heyman, 1998). Risk and safety do not form a ledger balance system where safety is the ‘remainder’, what is left over when you remove risk factors. As Wagenaar and Hudson aptly state, ‘while for some safety can be defined as the absence of accidents, it is clear that everyone appreciates that chance plays a considerable role in accidents. It is perfectly possible not to have had an accident for a long time, but nevertheless to have been skating continuously on thin ice’. (Wagenaar and Hudson, 1998: p. 65)

In other words, something always comes between binary poles: ‘chance’ is lurking on the thin ice between risks/hazards and safety. Thus, safety should not be defined as the absence of risk, nor can it be assumed that safety is necessarily present when nothing untoward is happening. In one way or another realization is key in the risk literature. It is exemplified in the deconstruction of certainty/ uncertainty and in the alternative focus on embedded logic and contingency (see, for example, Beck, 1999; Beck et al., 1994; Fox, 1999; Lupton, 1999; Wilkinson, 2001). In this article, we present an argument consistent with this broader move in the risk literature, but with a specific empirical focus. We ask: what does fire-safety knowledge look like in action? What happens to the accumulated knowledge of fire-risk factors in the messy practicalities of people’s lives?