Advanced Safety Management, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 22MORT—THE MANAGEMENT OVERSIGHT AND RISK TREE

If I taught at a university in a safety and environmental science degree program, students would be exposed to The Management Oversight and Risk Tree (MORT) for the thought base it provides on how accidents happen and what is needed for their prevention.

What MORT is and how it can be used is addressed in the Abstract for the third edition of the MORT User's Manual issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

MORT is a comprehensive analytical procedure that provides a disciplined method for determining the causes and contributing factors of major accidents. Alternatively, it serves as a tool to evaluate the quality of an existing program (p. iii).

Developing skills for the application of MORT requires study and continuous application to develop and retain knowledge of the technique and the skills necessary in its usage. It is not the intent here to have safety professionals become skilled in the application of MORT. But they would add to their knowledge and capabilities by developing an awareness of its content.

UNUSUAL ASPECTS

MORT is unusual in that it specifically promotes inquiry into management's upstream decision-making for the identification of sources of causal factors in much greater detail than most other incident investigation models. Why cite this difference?

Significant causal factors may derive from decisions made at an organization's governing body and senior management levels. Incident investigations ...