Definitions and explanatory notes

Gas related incident

For the purpose of this report a gas related incident refers to any incident that involves the sudden uncontrolled discharge of gas or that otherwise relates to gas and may or may not cause or be likely to cause injury to a person or damage to property.

FAFR

Fatal accident frequency rate is calculated with the formula:

FAFR =  Number of fatal accidents per year                                       
              Number of people at risk to the exposure of gas (population)

For ease of communication, the FAFR is multiplied by a million. Therefore the figure arrived at is the FAFR x 106. This figure allows a comparison of gas safety performance.

This is also referred to in the report as ‘the fatalities per million population’.

Fatality

An incident in which gas was found to be the cause and that resulted in accidental death.

Serious injury

An incident in which gas was found to be the cause and that resulted in such an injury that hospitalisation was required.

Minor injury

An incident in which gas was found to be the cause and resulted in such an injury that may have required medical attention but did not require hospitalisation.

Other incidents

A gas related incident that has not resulted in injury or fatality.

Major discharge

A major discharge is the unplanned and uncontrolled release inside a building of 10 m3 or more of gas or the unplanned and uncontrolled release in the open air of 1,000 m3 or more of gas.

Limitations of this report:

• This report is based on information derived from rigid legacy systems due for replacement in the near future. Parts of the data have been manually noted and then summarised for analysis. While care has been taken in the process of documenting this report, the risk of human error is still present.
• Fatalities where gas was involved but was not found to be the cause of the incident have been excluded from this report.
• The number of incidents in this report may vary in comparison to other documents previously released by EnergySafety. Although legislation requires prompt notification of incidents, there can be extended delays between when an incident occurs and when notification is received and this can impact on the data. This is more evident in cases with low severity. In other instances, some incidents may be found to be non-gas related after investigation and hence not included in the report.

To arrive at the FAFR, the demographic population has been utilised as the number of people at risk to the exposure of gas.