Accidents, like Monday's collapse of a corn silo at Caribbean Broilers' storage facility in Kingston, will happen.

The important thing, though, is to have in place preventative mechanisms to limit such accidents, and that when they do happen minimise their impact, including damage, injury or death.

In Monday's incident, Edgar Royal, 33, died, buried under an estimated 1,000 tonnes of corn, completely unaware of impending danger, it has been suggested, as he spoke on a mobile telephone.

An investigation, we are told, is under way to ascertain the reason for the collapse of the silo and, we expect, to determine the reason why Mr. Royal was in the area where he was standing when the accident occurred. So there is no attempt here to determine or apportion blame which, in any event, we have no competence to do.

But it seems to us that the events of Monday and Mr. Royal's death should place this matter of industrial safety seriously on the public agenda, including the capacity of firms and the national authorities to respond adequately in the face of tragedies. Indeed, Caribbean Broilers is not the only case of an industrial accident in recent times involving the loss of life. Nor is it the first time that a storage silo at a commodity factory has fallen with tragic impact.

For instance, several years ago there was a similar incident at the Jamaica Flour Mills at Rockfort, east Kingston, when two silos came down and three employees were crushed by thousands of tonnes of wheat. We are not certain whether in the aftermath of the debate and lawsuits over responsibility, any new safety protocols were put in place for such facilities, whether any were needed and whether their policing arrangements were, or are adequate.

Not so long ago, too, technicians cleaning storage and transmission vessels at the Petrojam oil refinery were overcome by fumes. There were deaths; as there have been, too, in fire at the loading rack at the same refinery. This, of course, is not a comprehensive list of the industrial accidents to have taken place in Jamaica, which have taken a high human toll, although it has not always been in deaths.

What has struck us in most of these cases is not so much the earnestness of the response, but a seeming lack of cutting edge professionalism. For example, it seems to us untenable that it should have taken more than nine hours to recover Mr. Royal's body after Monday's accident, where there was information on the general area he was standing just before the accident.

Perchance by some miracle Mr. Royal had survived the impact, had not been crushed by the weight of the corn and had been able to hold his breath for a time, he could hardly have sustained the effort for nine hours.

The question, therefore, is whether production plants carry more than basic equipment to respond to accidents, and are they required to? But the issue is not just industrial plants. Jamaica lacks a proper accident and emergency response body, as is so often demonstrated by the inadequacy displayed during crises. The Fire Brigade, the closest we come to such a national body, is poorly equipped and woefully under-trained.

We had better pray there are no catastrophes.

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