High-Risk Organizations. Resilience And Safety; Organizaciones de alto riesgo. Resiliencia y Seguridad

The growing social demand that took place during the second half of the 20th Century brought fast development of complex technologies. These technologies generated new risks, that together with the lack of prevention methodologies increased the amount of incidents and accidents; for example, Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Tokaimura (1999), Columbia (2003), Prestige (2002). In order to prevent these tragic events, several knowledge models were developed. These were oriented to analyze the causes of accidents and to obtain the necessary learning to avoid the production of these types of accidents. Consequently, this reactive approach allowed the implementation of corrective measures but not the anticipation or prevention of these undesirable events. The need to prevent such events has prompted a new approach, which does not only identify causes but also reasons, contexts and organizational behaviours in new situations. This new approach is known as engineering resilience. Its aim is to promote that socio-technical systems use all their capabilities and to be able to deploy new capacities in order to adapt to unexpected situations far from unacceptable limits of risk. Thus, high reliability organizations can continue their production in a safe way. (Author) 44 refs.