The Reconstruction of Complex Accident 

It is the worst thing that can happen in a courtroom: heated debates and animated comparisons between technical consultants, talking to each other in an incomprehensible language, inevitably leaving lawyers, prosecutors and judges on the edge of the discussion.

A corollary of this age-old problem concerns the incomprehensible and often irrefutable assertions proposed by many expert witnesses in court, and another problem arises from the confusion that occurs when a lawyer speaks in terms of causation and the technical consultant is thinking in terms of causal relationships between evidence and event.

A complex industrial accident should be examined using the same methodological approach that is regularly used by investigators when they are faced with a serious crime, like a murder. To begin with, an investigator performs a careful analysis of the crime scene. The valuable information that he will obtain will allow him to reconstruct the “dynamics” of the crime. In fact, according to the reading and interpretation of the evidence (tracks) recorded on the scene, he will be able to formulate a reconstructive hypothesis (sequence of events) of what happened, and then proceed to its verification.

Step 1 – Analysis of the Sequence of Events to pass from evidence to facts. The reconstruction of an accident is always organized in a sequence iteratively formulated, reformulated and refined by putting all the key events in chronological order according to a precise spatial organization considering the key events that represent a relevant change of state of the system. However the key-events shall be logically coherent and consistent with the evidence gathered by Police.

The consistency of linked events is evaluated by determining the cause-effect relationship (causal analysis)

The SEA top-level scheme is used when you have to assess the quality, effectiveness and, above all, the accuracy of the work done by a technical consultant in the reconstruction of events.

The reconstruction of an accident, though logically consistent steps, might not be conformable with the facts, and this occurs when reconstruction is done apart from the scientific method, which is the only method able to be both an ampliative method, verifiable and guaranteed.

Step 2 – From SEA to the assessment of responsibilities of qualified persons in criminal matters. The second key step to address is the one that leads to the assessment of criminal responsibility. It consists of the identification of the causal link that exists between a damaging event and a specific behavior of a specific subject. This passage, already difficult in itself, presupposes another, equally complex. There are two phases: the first to be proven is that a particular conduct is causally connected to a certain event, and as this event is reconstructed during the process of technical investigation, it must show to be detrimental to the final event.