The Lac-Megantic rail disaster tilts more to the Area One of the factor analytical model due to several reasons. This disaster was controllable due to the fact that the train was originally not repaired the way it should have been 8 months prior, the main focus was a short term patch up job on the train after the locomotive suffered engine failure. The locomotive was repaired using an epoxy like material that failed and led to a fire, this lead to the train being evacuated and finally set it on its rouge decent leading to its derailment. Although the train derailment was a horrible accident to the city of Nantes, Quebec it was not on the scale of being a global catastrophe, it is limited to a city wide emergency. The actions of individuals did play a role along with many other factors, but it cannot be said that it was any illegal action that led to this accident. …show more content…
overall the risk is decreasing as the oil and hazardous materials were cleaned up, and after this accidents the standards of the Transportation safety board of Canada implemented safety information in regards to securement of unattended trains, classification of perlououm crude oil, rail conditions at Lac Megantic, employee training programs, and changed many rules in regards to single person train operations in the hopes to prevent the likelihood of future accidents. The Lac-Megantic tilts more to the Area 1 of the model due to the fact that it relates with more of its contents then the
Experts say the many deaths could have been prevented with better safety training and better safety precautions. Since then new and old rules have been enforced. During the late 1980's the federal and provincial governments installed boards to regulate offshore oil and gas. These boards required anyone visiting the rigs to have minimum safety...
The Lac-Mégantic derailment occurred on July 6, 2013 in the town of Lac-Mégantic, which is located in the Eastern Townships of the Canadian province of Quebec and has population of about 6,000.The disaster occurred when a 74-car freight train, through a complex series of events, ran away and derailed. The events that led to the disaster included an inadequate repair on the lead locomotive’s engine, a lack of the necessary amount handbrakes, weak safety training for Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MM&A) staff, and a failure of federal oversight.
Even though Africville was an area of which African Canadians felt accepted and safe, many problems occurred with poverty being one of the major ones. Due to discrimination people would refuse to hire or gave low paying jobs. About 65 percent of Africville residents worked as household employees or care takers. During this time Halifax was retrieving taxes and not returning any major services like running water or street lights. It wasn’t until 1883 when Africville received their first school, however not even one of the teachers gained proper training till 1930. Also, about the time of 1917, The Halifax Explosion occurred; many homes were greatly damaged if not completely destroyed. Another major problem was in 1854; Halifax created a railway
Through the path of history, there have been several major events that influenced thousands of lives and were significant in forming the world today. One of the largest and deadliest events that occurred in history was a disaster not anybody could control or be held accountable for. This was Hurricane Katrina. On the early Monday morning of August 29th, 2005, a Category 5 rating Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States with winds up to 175 miles per hour and a storm surge of 20 feet high. Hurricane Katrina was one of the greatest and most destructive natural disasters recorded to make landfall in the United States. The natural causes of the hurricane, poorly structured levees, disaster inside the Superdome, and the
When complicated systems fail catastrophically, there are processes that aim to fulfill three general objectives. One, is to assign blame, another, to understand what happened and what why it happened. Last, is to fix the specific feature or problem so that disaster will not happen again. In the article “Blowup” published in 1996 by The New Yorker, author Malcolm Gladwell examines catastrophes such as the Challenger explosion, and the near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. He begins by defining the “rituals of disaster,” [1] a modern process in which physical evidence is collected and scrupulously analyzed to form a conclusion, and further explores the sociological aspects surrounding disasters, tying them to the human
Hazards pose risk to everyone. Our acceptance of the risks associated with hazards dictates where and how we live. As humans, we accept a certain amount of risk when choosing to live our daily lives. From time to time, a hazard becomes an emergent situation. Tornadoes in the Midwest, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast or earthquakes in California are all hazards that residents in those regions accept and live with. This paper will examine one hazard that caused a disaster requiring a response from emergency management personnel. Specifically, the hazard more closely examined here is an earthquake. With the recent twenty year anniversary covered by many media outlets, the January 17, 1994, Northridge, California earthquake to date is the most expensive earthquake in American history.
On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost due to structural failure in the left wing. On take-off, it was reported that a piece of foam insulation surrounding the shuttle fleet's 15-story external fuel tanks fell off of Columbia's tank and struck the shuttle's left wing. Extremely hot gas entered the front of Columbia's left wing just 16 seconds after the orbiter penetrated the hottest part of Earth's atmosphere on re-entry. The shuttle was equipped with hundreds of temperature sensors positioned at strategic locations. The salvaged flight recorded revealed that temperatures started to rise in the left wing leading edge a full minute before any trouble on the shuttle was noted. With a damaged left wing, Columbia started to drag left. The ships' flight control computers fought a losing battle trying to keep Columbia's nose pointed forward.
I. (Gain Attention and Interest): March 11, 2011. 2:45 pm. Operations at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant continued as usual. At 2:46 pm a massive 9.0 earthquake strikes the island of Japan. All nuclear reactors on the island shut down automatically as a response to the earthquake. At Fukushima, emergency procedures are automatically enabled to shut down reactors and cool spent nuclear fuel before it melts-down in a catastrophic explosion. The situation seems under control, emergency diesel generators located in the basement of the plant activate and workers breathe a sigh of relief that the reactors are stabilizing. Then 41 minutes later at 3:27 pm the unthinkable occurs. As workers monitored the situation from within the plant, citizens from the adjacent town ran from the coastline as a 49 foot tsunami approached. The tsunami came swiftly and flooded the coastline situated Fukushima plant. Emergency generators were destroyed and cooling systems failed. Within hours, a chain of events led to an explosion of reactor 1 of the plant. One by one in the subsequent days reactors 2, and 3 suffered similar fates as explosions destroyed containment cases and the structures surrounding the reactors (Fukushima Accident). Intense amount...
Travelling at a speed twice that of sound might seem to be something futuristic; however, this feat has already been achieved almost 40 years ago by the world’s only supersonic passenger aircraft-The Concorde. Concorde brought a revolution in the aviation industry by operating transatlantic flights in less than four hours. The slick and elegant aircraft with one of the most sophisticated engineering was one of the most coveted aircrafts of its time. However, this was all destined to end when Air France Flight 4590 was involved in a tragic disaster just outside the city of Paris on July 25, 2000. The crash killed 113 people, but more disastrous was its impact. The belief and confidence people had with Concorde gradually started to fade, and finally Concorde was grounded after two and a half years of the crash. Official reports state that the main cause of the crash was a piece of metal dropped by a Continental aircraft that flew moments before Concorde, but, over the last decade, the report has met a lot of criticism, and many alternative hypotheses have thus been proposed.
It is also the same as the factors that will be listed as the prime factors that caused a catastrophic disaster at Tenerife airport. 60 investigators were sent down to Tenerife airport to investigate the cause of the accidents. All the possible factors that found to be the cause for the disaster were list down, being research and investigate, and also some investigators do study group to exchanges the information and opinions for the accident. After many years of investigation, they had solved and concluded the case as stated in their reports that being referred to complete this assignment.
The November thirteenth terrorist attacks on Paris stunned the world. With the deaths of 129 people in the metropolis, it has veritably reached the same severity as the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Now that the world has had a chance to recover from the shock of the tragedy however, it is now faced with many hard questions. Why did this attack take place? Why did it take place where and when it did? As with most catastrophes, the most prevailing question surrounding the whole ordeal is whether anything could have been done to prevent it, but the answer is far from cut and dried. The contributing factors of the attacks are many, the most frightening clearly being that the Paris attacks were the result of comprehensive
The State of Uttarakhand is vastly covered by high Himalayan Mountains comprising the Himadri and Shivalik ranges. The existence of such mountainous terrain in the state makes it prone to many natural disasters such as Landslides & Floods. Also, the fact that the entire area of Uttarakhand is categorized as Seismic Zone IV which makes it prone to major Earthquakes. Several major and minors rivers originate in the hills of Uttarakhand. Two major rivers, i.e. Ganga & Yamuna have their sources in the upper reaches of Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers respectively.
The Japan disaster was devastating, and it had an abundance of causes and effects. The nuclear disaster, the tsunami, and the earthquake were the causes of the disaster in Japan. In addition, the disaster had countless effects on the land and people in Japan. The disaster in Japan was as devastating and tragic as 9/11. Both events took a great number of lives and left their country shocked, but prepared them for anything similar that might happen in the future. Knowing the causes and effects of Japan’s disaster can prepare other people and countries around the world for a comparable disaster.
An accident or hazard are inevitable and frequently occurring events that turns up immediately and unexpectedly leading to some negative consequences. If we look into an academic definition of a hazard, it can be defined as any external agent which can possess a threat to human life, animals, sea life and our surrounding environment through physical, chemical, environmental or mechanical mode of contamination (Kungwani 2014). Often when two particular terms are put under consideration that is risk and hazard, there is miss-interpretation of definitions for both the terms as people consider risk and hazard the same thing. Risk is differentiated from hazard in a sense that it defines the probability of occurrence of unexpected
Natural disasters like the great hurricane Katrina of 2005, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Krakatau volcano eruption in Indonesia, the 2009 earthquake in Eastern Bhutan, the greatest earthquake of 2010 in Haiti and the recent Mount Everest avalanches in Nepal and many more other natural disaste...