Abstract
Failures in complex technological systems could have multiple dire aftermaths, including many deaths and injuries. These events, such as nuclear accidents, pose serious threats and long-lasting health and environmental consequences to workers, the local public, and possibly the whole country and neighboring regions. Such failures, given interconnectivities and interdependencies, could also have spillover effects and threaten the integrity of other systems operating in the same area. There is an essential need for effective integration and interoperability among multiple emergency response agencies, possibly from different countries, in the case of an accident in a safety-sensitive industry that causes the release of hazardous materials or contaminants. This article proposes a generic integrated system-oriented model to address this urgent need. It has been applied to the Persian Gulf area and its waters as a case study because of the existence of multiple co-located, safety-sensitive industries such as nuclear power generation, offshore oil and gas drilling, seawater desalination, and seafood harvesting. The Persian Gulf region and its ecosystems are highly vulnerable, and the countries around the Gulf are tightly interdependent, with an urgent need for cooperative emergency response planning. The Black Sea and other semiclosed, water-based ecosystems can also benefit from this model.
Highlights
Human ingenuity has resulted in complex technological systems whose accidents rival in their effects the greatest natural disasters, sometimes with even higher death tolls and greater environmental damage
The Persian Gulf has the largest number of desalination plants in the world (Fig. 3), with a total capacity of 11 million m3 per day in 2008; this was equivalent to 45 % of global daily water production (Lattemann and Hopner 2008)
The foundation of this model is a framework developed by Rasmussen (1997) that captures socio-technical interactions within organizational hierarchies (Fig. 8) and illustrates factors that affect the operations and safety of a complex technological system delineated in interactive layers
Summary
Human ingenuity has resulted in complex technological systems whose accidents rival in their effects the greatest natural disasters, sometimes with even higher death tolls and greater environmental damage. The major objective of this article, with the help of lessons from the past, is to provide a system-oriented model for understanding and designing the interoperability of multiple emergency response organizations and their command, control, and communication operations in largescale disasters This is done by providing (1) a brief description of the state of affairs in the Persian Gulf, a semiclosed area that is home to multiple safety-sensitive industries that face the risk of major accidents and toxic releases; (2) a brief overview of a challenging issue that is hampering emergency responses to recent major disasters; (3) an analysis of the major subsystems of an emergency response system, illustrating the critical interactions of those subsystems in a three agency emergency deployment; (4) a model to specify the needed collaboration and interoperability of key entities and players in a sample of two major safety-sensitive industries (such as nuclear power generation, offshore oil and gas drilling, and seawater desalination) in a typical Persian Gulf country at the time of an emergency, and expanding the proposed model with a bilateral and multilateral framework for the collaboration and cooperation of multiple agencies from different countries; (5) some specific recommendations for the implementation of an integrated, system-oriented model for emergency response; and (6) thoughts on the generalizability of the proposed model and its application to similar areas and settings such as the Black Sea. The model proposed in this study is generic in nature. It has been applied to the Persian Gulf setting as a case study because of the existence of multiple safety-sensitive industries (Meshkati et al 2016)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
