Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Huang Shan , 2006.06

Department of Transportation Technology and Management
National Chiao Tung University

 　　After industrial revolution, a wide range of mechanization makes labor work monotonous and boring, and the human factors become the important components affecting the industrial safety. We have learned from many industrial disaster cases that if the operator can respond with a prompt and appropriate reaction in time when an accident occurs, the loss or damage will be reduced to the minimum. This safety crisis handling ability is especially important for the railway system due to its high speed operation as well as heavy loading of passengers and freight. The safe research on the railway system has been focused on investigating the causes of accidents. However, few studies have been conducted to explore the effect of employee's reaction ability on the severity of accident occurrence. This study was undertaken to evaluate the ability of handling safety crisis for the station staffs of railway system and explore the difficulties of related taks for rescue when an accident occurs. Through the designed questionnaire, an empirical study was implemented by interviewing the station staffs of Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) and 166 effective samples were collected for this study.
　　The Rasch models were then applied to measure the safety crisis handling abilities of TRA station staffs when facing various types of accidents, and the difficulties of related rescue tasks were then identified. The study results showed that the safety crisis handling abilities were different between various groups of station staffs in terms of their age, education, and seniority. Furthermore, some rescue tasks were found to be more difficult than the others. This study really provided a set of valuable imformation for TRA to establish their training and education programs for accident prevention and rescue.