Safety management systems from Three Mile Island to Piper Alpha, a review in English and Dutch literature for the period 1979 to 1988

Major disasters in the 1980s generated knowledge on process safety, and soon process safety outplaced developments in occupational safety, which had been leading before. Theories and models in this period had advanced sufficiently to explain disasters, but were still unable to predict probabilities and scenarios of future disasters. In the 1980s 'latent errors' appeared in safety literature, and in The Netherlands the concept of 'impossible accidents' appeared. Safety management was strongly influenced by developments in quality management.