Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment
The process
Risk assessment is a cycle, not an event: identify hazards across baseline, routine, non-routine, change, and emergency conditions; assess risk using severity, likelihood, and exposure; prioritize; apply controls; verify residual risk; communicate and re-assess. Non-routine work - maintenance, startup, shutdown, upset conditions, and infrequent tasks - is where exam questions hide hazards, because those tasks are often omitted from routine assessments.
Techniques to recognize
- JHA/JSA - task-level, step-by-step; best for physical/ergonomic hazards on defined jobs.
- HAZOP - process deviations using guide words; suits chemical and continuous processes.
- FMEA - component failure modes and their effects; scored by severity, occurrence, detection.
- Fault tree - works backward from a defined top event to contributing causes.
- What-if / checklist - broad screening for changes and audits.
Traps
Risk matrices use ordinal scales. A score of 15 is not 1.5 times worse than 10, and scores cannot be averaged across a facility. Watch for items that assess only acute injury severity and ignore chronic health hazards (noise, silica, ergonomic loading, chemical exposure). Also watch for "the assessment was completed last year" - it must be triggered by change.
Rule of thumb
Rank, don't calculate. Use the matrix to sort hazards into action bands, then apply the hierarchy of controls to the highest band first. If two credible assessors disagree by more than one band, the descriptions of severity and likelihood are too vague to use.
Worked example
A crew rates a task 4 × 3 = 12 and a second task 5 × 2 = 10. The scores are close enough that both fall in the same "high" band; the correct action is to control both, not to argue over the difference of two points.