• Question: what comes with the dangers of your job?

    Asked by ameliaxx to Yasmin, Tadhg, Liz, Lee, Hilly on 24 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Yasmin Ali

      Yasmin Ali answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I work in the office at the moment, so not many dangers there… probably the most dangerous part is crossing the road when I walk to work! Sometimes I work offshore on a gas platform, so I have to get a helicopter there. There’s a small risk of a helicopter crash, but we are all trained in what to do if that happens and we all have to wear special waterproof flight suits. On the platform, we follow very strict health and safety regulations to make sure we stay safe. Also most of the equipment is designed to be ‘fail safe’, so if something goes wrong, it automatically shuts down in a safe way.

      So yes there are dangers, but our job is to make sure we engineer them out.

    • Photo: David Hill

      David Hill answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      Thankfully my job isnt “dangerous”

      I work in a fairly safe environment, the only issues we occasionally have are people leaving their bags on the floor! (trip hazard!)

      I occasionally visit sites, and follow all the safety rules there, to ensure that I return home each night in one piece!

      Engineers are there to design out the dangers, making everything we do as safe as is practically possible! (sometimes risky things need to happen, but we need to be sure to design systems to make this safe for people to work)

    • Photo: Tadhg O'Donovan

      Tadhg O'Donovan answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      Health and Safety – that’s what comes with “perceived” danger.

      It is the responsibility of the engineer to design for safety. So although the solution might work (do the job) – it isn’t a good design until it is a safe design.

      So overall – it’s not a dangerous profession as we consider H&S from the very beginning of a new project

    • Photo: Lee Margetts

      Lee Margetts answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      The only danger in my job is repetitive strain injury in my fingers when typing code. Explosions can happen in computer models running on the supercomputer. These can be quite scary when seen through a virtual reality headset, but not very dangerous!

    • Photo: Liz Meddings

      Liz Meddings answered on 25 Jun 2015:

      My job is quite safe these days. Health and Safety is really important on construction sites and if something feels dangerous then we are told not to do it.

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