How to prevent a normal accident in a high reliable organisation ? The art of resilience, a case study in the chemical industry

Abstract : The trend in France in the chemical industry following the Toulouse accident in 2001 has created a situation where some of the installations have got doser to the definition of high reliable or resilient Systems. This papers based on an empirical case study elaborâtes on the question: can we see better with the help of an articulation of safety engineering, safety management and social concepts (extracted from the safety and accident field) some dimensions, for example the level of resilience (or reliability), that are not captured today with traditional tools ? Our approach articulates two investigative modes to capture an organisational safety dynamic: a normal study approach (what's happening when nothing is happening ?) with an incidental-accidental one (looking at past incidents or accidents and their organisational genesis) in order to generate assumptions regarding the presence of organisational patterns influencing safety.