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Date
: 23/06/2005
Source: Department of Transport
Title: Radebe: National Standards for Railway Safety
Minister of Transport's remarks on National Standards
for Railway Safety Launch of SANS 3000-1, Sandton
South Africa has an extensive and highly complex railway system,
covering the whole range of activities associated with modern
economic life. This system has developed over more than a hundred
years and in its time has been the source of tremendous innovation,
both in terms of track architecture and design, as well as in
signalling, wagon and locomotive components and systems.
But, as is to be expected, throughout its long history, South
African rail has also witnessed some terrible accidents caused by a
combination of human error, technology failure, design faults or
simply recklessness. The tragedy of the Bloukrans Bridge on the
railway line between Grahamstown and Port Alfred in the early part
of the last century sent shockwaves through the country and indeed
received world-wide attention. That accident went a long way to
promoting the systems of rail safety, regulation and inspection
that have become a strong feature of the railways administration of
our country ever since.
New conditions however bring new challenges and frequently new
technologies also bring unexpected problems or can often result in
even unintended consequences. Quite often, unfortunately,
shortcomings only reveal their horrific consequences when accidents
occur, but, if investigated properly, such accidents can provide
insights in how not to do things, or how to alter technology
applications, and indeed reshape and redesign systems to prevent
such accidents from happening again.
But none of this work, of investigation, assessment or redesign,
can occur without a foundation based on solid, legitimate and
widely accepted engineering safety and safety management
regulations. My point quite simply, is that behind every incident
and investigation stands a set of rules and regulations that are
benchmarked against the best in the world and are themselves tested
on a continuous and stringent basis by competent authorities.
It is for this basic reason that I am pleased to receive the latest
in an ongoing series of documents related to the modernisation and
expansion of our rail safety regulation system to meet the demands
of our new era. Last July we released the Regulations for the
Safety Management System for operators that cover all aspects of
operational safety, reporting of occurrences, the nature of
information to be supplied to the Regulator, and so on. Currently
we are finalising the second set of regulations required by the
National Railway Safety Regulator Act, namely those that deal with
the Development of Standards, including national, industry and
local standards that are influenced by geographic location and
circumstances and so on. These are highly complex and have thus
taken some time to finalise, but I am informed that we will
probably be able to release them for public comment shortly.
The document we have before us today, as has been explained, is
part of the larger project, and in essence provides much of the
detail that is needed to give flesh to the Regulations released
last year. They cover a range of areas, including technical
aspects; track, civil and electrical engineering requirements;
rolling stock; train control systems and related equipment;
operational systems; intermodal interfaces; and human
factors.
A lot of hard work has gone into producing the SANS 3000-1, or to
give it its rather intimidating official title the South African
National Standard: Railway Safety Management: Part 1: General.
(SANS 3000-1: 2005/ RSR 001: 2005). I wish to extend my own and
government's appreciation to everyone involved in the working group
that comprised representatives of the railway industry who
voluntarily gave of their time to develop this standard. They
include Spoornet, Metrorail, the SARCC, the Railroad Association of
South Africa, the Heritage Railway Association of South Africa,
Organised Labour, and the DoT. This is not the end of the road by
any means, but it is an important step none the less.
When I addressed the newly constituted National Railway Safety
Regulator in August 2003 I challenged the institution to "seek a
balance between what could be seen as safety engineering on the one
hand and reliability engineering on the other", where "safety
engineering emphasizes the introduction and use of technologies
designed to prevent any possible incident, and reliability
engineering depends on mathematical probabilities of the remoteness
of types of incident happening and suggests the possible adoption
of compromises in technology design that are usually determined by
cost factors." I also indicated that we probably needed a public
debate about these issues, particularly in the context we find
ourselves that stresses transparency and public access to
information. The rail sector impacts directly on our public life on
a 24hour basis, and thus must be accessible to the public's
concerns as well as to the needs of thorough, unbiased, and expert
analysis and inspection.
We are well down that road, and the release of the SANS 3000-1 is a
further step in that direction. I would urge, however, that we
still have some debate to carry out, and for a much wider
appreciation of the work of the Regulator as a whole to be
developed.
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