Organisational safety indicators in aquaculture – a preliminary study

Abstract

The aquaculture industry has since the 70’s grown to become one of the most important industries in Norway. A safety challenge for the Norwegian fish farming companies is escape of salmon. During the last decade, the main cause to escapes has changed from structural failures to "human errors". The paper addresses the need for improving safety in fish farming operations by implementing systematic means for risk management. The ob-jective of this preliminary study has been to evaluate whether the Operational Safety Condition (OSC) meth-od provides a feasible tool for identifying and understanding organisational factors and conditions that influ-ence safety levels at the fish farms. The basis for the study is escape of fish. The results demonstrates that OSC seems to be a promising tool for audits of the organisational safety conditions in aquaculture companies.