Intuitive Schemes, Procedures and Validations for Decision and Action of the Emergency Leader, Case and Simulation Analysis

Accidents are events of the risk activity that can have as consequence from the increase of cost until the loss of the business, this depends on the frequency, the impact, the perception of the society and the complexity of the communications. The big difficulty of analyzing the initiating causes, the promoting environment, and the secondary causes of top events is in the urgency to act in a corrective or preventive way.

This urgency affects the need for rapid decision making, with knowledge, skills and referral of rules not sufficient to contain the danger that extravasates of equipment and processes. Thus, the investigations and the speeches of the processes are suggested for the leader and the team without treatment of crisis situations.

The characteristics for the leader and the team are discussed from the decision model. One of the main requirements for acting in the middle of an emergency is know how to manage the level of stress by reducing the possibility of loss of cognitive function in the emergency brigade. The Leader, although having important command characteristics and being able to "energize" the group, needs to understand the importance of retrieving information about major impacts on the original danger line, or the danger line after his intervention.

This article intends to discuss the decision models of the group that treats emergencies in industrial activities of high risk in both the leadership role and the support to the leader. Real and / or projected industrial and public service accidents are discussed taking into account risk reports or analyzes and characteristics identified through decision models. Thus, accidents, FPSO São Mateus, Fireball with LPG, Piper Alpha, Madre de Deus, Bhopal and Texas City are the object of study to evaluate perception, decision, memory, competence, "energization", emotional balance, velocity and action of the leader and team.

The aspects analyzed in each accident are the description of the context, the history before the event, the events close to the top event, the characteristics of the leadership and the team, and the critical analysis identifying the expected pattern and what was found in the occurrence. What is intends to verify is the quantitative difference between the standard state and the observations of the facts happened for each case and later to realize a mean of these characteristics showing the structuring of the team and of the leader for the treatment of the emergency and contingency actions.

The characteristics of the emergency leader are analyzed based on the criteria: Perception of the hazard where failure to perceive the impact and possibility of occurrence of the event will create a comfort in the team that controls the danger until complacency in actions and risk aversion. The impact is decreased if the non-perception is in the deviation phase and the impact will be increased if the non-perception of the occurrence is close to happening. The presence of the deviation is recognized when the transient state is differentiated from the abnormal one. This depends on the experience of the operator who must have visual memory and experience. The perception of decision risk is measured, therefore, when the difference in state is noticed at some stage of the fault's life cycle. In the decision of action in emergency situation it is expected that from the deviation one detects the abnormality and the sensation of urgency.

Energization. Energizing the moment of emergence depends on knowing the impending release of danger, which indicates a high risk of the top event occurring. The complacency state does not generate enough energization to initiate emergency coping. Decision. The decision history indicates if the emergency leader is prepared for actual action. Competence. To understand the causal nexus of the phenomena involved in the accident, to have experience and experience similar to the activities related to the events, know how to treat with situations already seen and to be able to infer, extrapolate and test unusual situations.

Memory. Parallel Memory Rescue means to quickly and conjoin the history of the week and day, similar past sensations without cognitive processing, comparison, interpolation, hypothesis, confirmation of the pattern. Impulse and Speed. Impulse action seems to be inappropriate as it does not perform cognitive pattern recognition and uses the intuitive recognition of the action environment. In the case of emergencies, often the leader does not have time for this cognitive recognition.

The characteristics of the emergency leader are analyzed based on the following criteria: Memory rescue. A number of procedures, manuals, historical and technical specifications should be available for fast retrieval of memory for interpretation of emergency brigade problems. Knowledge base. If the decision support team in command of the emergency does not have sufficient knowledge to relate the causal nexus and the environments that may be potentiating the release of the danger energy or even what the likely cause for the barrier failures for each technical system will be difficult establish corrective or mitigation actions. Emotional balance. The discussion of solutions to support the emergency command requires care to avoid emotional instability.

Fast Cognitive Elaboration. The speed for memory rescue, validation, calculations, conferences, and comparisons should be high enough to enable rapid cognitive processing that supports the emergency command. Action of support in the emergency. The set of memory rescue, knowledge base, emotional balance and rapid cognitive elaboration allow solutions.

The analyzes are constructed by making the equivalence of the characteristics of the led with the leaders. Thus, a fast team cognitive enhances the quality of perception in releasing the hazard and its risk. The energizing promoted by leadership through its command action demands an emotional balance of the team to be able to rescue information that the leadership does not possess. The command should have fast speed but team action requires a comparison of requirements to avoid contingency failure. The leader can only develop emergency action if he has a well-structured working memory from previous experiences and especially from the sensations and noises known in the emergency. The knowledge of the team must support the competence of the leader, above all, the gaps of one are covered by the other.

For the analysis of the results we used the radar chart with the launch of the measurement of the characteristics already discussed in classifications 1 (missing), 2 (intermediate) and 3 (complete equal to the desired standard).

Based on the Madre de Deus Ball of Fire case where the LPG preheating furnace exploded. Some deviations in the process were identified due to improper maintenance of the sphere causing the presence of LPG with oxygen, and the prolongation of explosions and leaks with great loss of assets and personnel.

Analyzing the results it is noticed that there is a low perception of the risk of a deviation becoming an event by the leader's look and also, the team's low cognitive quality, that is, low speed for action. It is considered that the level of competence of the leadership is average for unusual situations, but the knowledge of the team is great to discuss the phenomena. The memory of the emergency leaders is intermediate because it does not include deviations, but in return, the memory rescue in the case of LPG is good since the shift books are preserved and the maintenance records are of good quality. In the evaluated case it is verified that the speed of command of the leadership is fast, which in a certain way can be a problem if it is precipitate and the attitude for action is low. The attitude of the leader is considered intermediate, since the team has a low emotional balance. From these analyzes it is concluded that the team does not support the decisions of the leader, reason to cause accidents.

Taking into account the average of responses of all accidents addressed it is noticed that the perception of leadership and cognitive are low, causing a delay to help the accident. The competence of the leader is less than the knowledge of the team proving that the approach to the environment of the accident makes the operator more experienced. The memory of the leader and the memory of the team are average. Leadership energizing is low compared to the team's emotional balance. And team action is low relative to leadership command speed, which can be justified due to low energization.

Therefore, it is concluded that it is necessary to devise procedures to select a brigade team, prepare training, analyze the effect of stress for leaders and brigade staff, simulate human behavior at high stress and what care taken. In order to minimize accidents and their impacts, ensuring the safety of the process.