Safety Impacts of Incident Management at Incident Sites

Incident Management (IM) entails the collection of measured aimed at clearing the road as soon as possible after an incident has occurred. The rationale behind IM is to improve the safety of the different risk groups around the incident site, as well as to normalize the traffic stream as quickly as possible. In this paper, we investigate the effects of Incident Management on the safety of different risk groups. To this end, an overview is made of the
effects of an incident on the safety, by conducting a Delphi. It is concluded that for all risk groups, an incident brings additional safety risks especially in the first stages of an incident. The effects of the individual IM measures were quantified and combined with the results of the Delphi, leading to an overview of the effect of IM combined with the risks of a secondary incident. From this investigation it is concluded that IM has a positive effect on safety of all risk groups, especially in the later stages of incident handling. In the first stages the risks are relatively high, and the impacts of IM are relatively low. Therefore a gap between the two exists there. This shows that in the first stages of
incident handling, there is still room for improvement in the safety of certain risk groups.