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SAFETY PSYCHOLOGIST IGGING DEEPER – THE TIME FOR FEAR IS NEAR The road toward risk tolerance – the journey begins? In the first edition of Digging Deeper I explored my own near fatal cycling accident, and the thoughts that went through my mind as I spent over a month lying around in a hospital bed. That was almost three years ago now – and the reflections continue. My contribution in the last edition hinted at the concept of what has become known as “risk tolerance”. So allow me to begin to explore risk tolerance with you, whilst using the same metaphor of cycling. What is the risk associated with riding a bicycle, responsibly, to school? I am going to suggest to you that an accident is probably somewhere around “unlikely”. Some might say “rare”, given the number of kids riding to school each day etc. That’s one of the problems with applying a quasi- statistical measure to this sort of exercise anyway. For the sake of the argument let us accept the “unlikely” position. Now let’s have a look at the consequences. Someone on the left hand side of the road getting “sideswiped” by a car is probably going to, at the very least, get some bark knocked off. It is not beyond the realm of possibility at all, that they may experience multiple fractures, or worse. So when we drop these on the standard (though highly ineffective) risk matrix we find a medium or high result. Depending on your personal or organisational view, there shall be responses to these results, I hope. So now I am going to move our bicycle out across in front of the traffic. What we are doing is now placing ourselves amongst the traffic flow – in safety parlance don’t we call this “line of fire”? So let us again consider the same questions. As we increase the level of exposure to the vehicles, it would be fair to suggest that we are also increasing the likelihood of something happening. So if our previous rating here was “unlikely”, we have to at least up the ante to “possible”. Now if the event actually occurs, and we are now amongst traffic, the consequences too we would think are going to have to ramp up a bit. We are now almost certain to experience multiple fractures or death. I am hoping that most of us would consider this to be in the severe category on our risk matrix. We are now looking at “possible” and “severe”, 34 AUSTRALASIAN MINE SAFETY JOURNAL