Safety in Design

6 Design with Ample Margins

6.1 Introduction

Making designs with ample margins is recommended in this chapter. The need to pay attention to safety aspects is discussed in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5, it is advised to make accidents and incidents virtually impossible. It was sometimes an arbitrary choice in which of these three chapters a specific case would fit in best.

First, transport receives attention in Section 6.2. Road and rail transport are followed by a bob‐run accident in Canada in 2010. Space travel and air travel come next. The accidents with the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 are described in this section.

A mine accident at Lengede in Germany in 1963, the collapse of a terminal at Roissy Airport at Paris in 2004, and the escape of a gorilla from a zoo at Rotterdam in The Netherlands are described in Section 6.3, which concerns society.

6.2 Transport

6.2.1 Coach Accident in the Sierre Tunnel in Switzerland in 2012

Event 

At 21.15 h on March 13, 2012, a Belgian coach crashed in the Sierre tunnel in Switzerland. The coach was on its way to bring school children and their attendants back to Belgium. The school children had had a holiday of 9 days, in which they also had practiced skiing. There were 52 people on board the bus, of which 22 children, 4 attendants, and 2 drivers died in the crash. The bus had got off the road and had collided head‐on with a wall of a lay‐by, and that wall was perpendicular to the road direction (see ...