New accident board must watch its step
Written by Writer on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
New accident board must watch its step
Yoko Inoue / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The newly established Japan Transport Safety Board has greater authority to ensure measures aimed at preventing a repeat of accidents by organizations that are involved. But questions remain about whether safety can be achieved simply by trying to pin blame on individuals and isolated causes.
The new board was established on Oct. 1 by reorganizing the Construction and Transport Ministry’s Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission and the Maritime Accident Inquiry Agency. When a transport accident happens, the board can issue advisories directly to transport firms if the board concludes that operational management of a transport firm should be improved to prevent a recurrence.
The transport ministry held an explanatory meeting for the public about the new organization on Sept. 12 at the ministry’s headquarters building in Tokyo.
“My main concern is the organization’s greater ability to issue improvement orders,” said one of the attendees, Kuniko Miyajima, secretary general of a group organized by the families of the victims killed in the 1985 crash of a Japan Airlines jet in Gunma Prefecture.
Miyajima, 61, added: “I want the board to secure reports from transport companies on items they plan to improve based on the board’s instructions. I also want the information in the reports to be available to the public.”
The new organization is expected to have more weight in sending its messages to concerned parties and to the public.
The defunct Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission was only allowed to advise the transport minister, even when it judged that an improvement plan should be made to prevent further accidents.
Under the new system, however, the new board can directly issue advisories to businesses. If businesses do not implement recommended measures, the board has the power to make this news public.
Taking this into consideration, when an accident occurs, the new body is supposed to hold an explanatory meeting for victims and victims’ families after releasing an accident report and provide explanations at the meetings in easy-to-understand language.
Meanwhile, a special team of analysts who specialize in accident prevention measures will be formed. Their goal will be to investigate human factors that could cause aviation, maritime and terrestrial accidents. The analysts will then compile reports and propose preventive measures.
All these new efforts can be applauded. But how active will the board be in communicating transport safety issues? This will surely be a test for the new organization.
The organization has 181 members, including administrators, making it three times as big as the old commission. The number of inspectors for aircraft and railway accidents is the same as before, 22 for air disasters and 15 for railway accidents. But the number of new inspectors to deal with ship and vessel accidents is 68 if those in Tokyo and other locations are put together. Last year, the commission handled 57 aircraft and railway accidents, while the agency investigated 4,500 ship and vessel accidents.
The new board is planning to restrict the number of accidents it handles in Tokyo to about 40 or 50, taking the importance of each accident into consideration, but it is probably bound to face a trial-and-error period while trying to speed up investigations.
Lingering problems from the commission also remain.
At the end of July, Japan made its first report in 14 years on an appendix clause of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which prevents the inquiry records of an air disaster from being used for purposes other than the original one and requires countries to report when they cannot fulfill the requirement. The government had to make more such reports during those 14 years than it did previously, but in Japan it has been regarded as the norm to extend the use of inquiry records to police or courts. In other words, there has been no clear distinction between police investigations and inquiries made by the commission or will be made by the new board.
The new board also has taken over a memorandum that was exchanged in 1972 between the former Transport Ministry and the National Police Agency in which the commission agreed to give expert opinion on transport accidents, including railway and ship accidents, at the request of investigation bodies. This is another example of the commission collaborating with police.
“The social environment has changed drastically,” said Tokai University Prof. Yoshihiko Ikeda, who specializes in liability for negligence in air disasters. “The organization has changed and it’s now more independent. Maybe it would have been better to review on this occasion the way [police] investigations and [the commission's] inquiries were being done.”
Debates on how to draw a line between the board’s inquiries and police investigations are making their way into medical care as well. A case in point is the so-called Ono hospital case, in which the Fukushima District Court acquitted a doctor of professional negligence causing death and in which the commission and police investigators clashed.
There also are concerns that in an accident in which many intricate circumstances affect each other, blaming only the person at the end of a long chain of events will not prevent similar accidents.
(Oct. 28, 2008)
