ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract.

It is estimated that over 100 farmers die every year in South Korea because of accidents related to agricultural machinery. The National Institute of Agricultural Science (NAS) has conducted periodic surveys to provide basic data for the establishment of prevention strategy. Based on the analysis of the surveyed accident cases, a risk assessment of hazards causing accidents, a new approach, was conducted. A risk assessment is generally done through 4 major processes; hazards identification, frequency estimation, estimation of consequence severity, and risk evaluation. In this paper, the results of formal 2 processes for tractor accidents were introduced. Hazards were identified by reviewing the accident case records and then confirmed by the results of Delphi survey, of which participants were 27 experts on agricultural machinery accidents. The type of each accident cases were also classified during the case reviews because the estimations of frequency and consequence severity were carried out separately by types. Frequencies of hazards were estimated by following process: (1) estimation of probability of each hazards in each type, (2) calculation of frequencies of each type, and (3) frequency estimations of each hazards. Among 588 accident cases collected by NAS, 215 cases were farm-work accidents and the other 373 were traffic accidents. By the kind of a machine, the number of two-wheel tractor accidents was 453 cases, of which 178 was farm-work accident and 275 was traffic accident while that of four-wheel tractor was 135, of which 37 was farm-work accident and 98 was traffic accident. Results of accident records review and Delphi survey identified 56 hazards of tractor accidents and the accident cases were classified into 19 types, 10 for farm-work accidents and 9 for traffic accidents. The most frequent type of farm-work accidents was rollover in road and that of traffic accidents was rear collision with no fault of a tractor operator while travelling straight. The results of frequency estimations of all 56 hazards showed that carelessness was the most frequently contributing hazard followed by negligence of front watching in both two-wheel and four-wheel tractors.