Is Chemical Engineering dangerous?

[u/West-Wash4301]

Hi I currently am a high school student and planned to study chemical engineering. It sounds fun to me since I'm good at science and math and like chemistry very much. However I've seen many news talking about the incidents happened around the world on chemical engineers such as explosion in the plant and poisoning in chemicals, they look so dangerous and I can't be sure anymore whether I would go on in this industry... do you think I can still learn it or not?? Thank you for your advices.

[u/Wonkel_]

My professor used to refer to an incident, such as an explosion, as the Swiss cheese model. Imagine taking a stick and trying to poke it through all the holes of a cheese and reaching the other side, it’s not that easy, you need to ensure that all the holes are lining up etc. Basically it is an analogy for an incident, meaning a lot of safety features need to go wrong/fail for an incident to occur.

As an engineer your goal is to put in all the safety precautions to ensure safe operations and if something does go wrong the operation will be shut down and the risk will be mitigated.

In short, when something goes wrong, it’s usually because a lot of things went wrong in succession.