Major Hazard Events Research Articles

Description of the management of a major hazard event in a high priority installation

Industrial accidents and accidents caused by natural disasters in factories, plants and power stations are the most dangerous and pose the greatest risk. As a result of social and economic development, more and more energy carriers, raw materials, semi-finished and finished products are produced and marketed, which may pose a risk to the environment and the public. In the course of our work, we have studied a facility or plant that is a high priority, including one where ammonia is present as part of the technology in quantities of over 1000 kg. We examined the different types of accidental events that can occur in this type of plant and the need and importance of the measures taken to deal with these events and their purpose. Our aim is to identify weaknesses, propose solutions and develop alternatives for improvement. To ensure the highest standards of safety and protection of workers at work and to emphasise the shared responsibility of senior management and all workers to achieve and maintain an effective safety management system. Through our work, we want to contribute to the improvement, development and safer management of activities in an operational high priority plant.

Infrastructure planning emergency levels of service for the Wellington region, Aotearoa New Zealand – An operationalised framework

‘Planning Emergency Levels of Service’ (PELOS) are goals for the delivery of infrastructure services following a major hazard event, such as an earthquake or flood. This paper presents an operationalised PELOS framework for the Wellington region based on interviews with emergency and critical infrastructure managers and discusses important changes from the preliminary to the operationalised framework. A shared understanding of these PELOS will help Wellington region infrastructure providers, emergency management professionals and the potentially impacted communities plan for major events. PELOS for the energy, telecommunications, transport, and water sectors have been developed, and high-level interdependencies considered. The PELOS framework can be updated for other regions, by the critical infrastructure entities and emergency managers, using locally relevant hazard scenarios. In turn, this approach can inform the end-users (communities) of the goals of the critical infrastructure providers following a major hazard event.

MACHINE LEARNING FOR THE DOCUMENTATION, PREDICTION, AND AUGMENTATION OF HERITAGE STRUCTURE DATA

Abstract. The paper presents an effort to develop learning models based on the massive amounts of data that has been accumulated over the past decades during the process of digital documentation of heritage structures around the globe especially those in disaster zones.The development of an ontology is proposed that describes heritage buildings, their sites, and major hazard events that may cause damage to them. This ontology can serve as a repository for documenting heritage structures and provide highly structured data for developing machine learning systems that can identify patterns of damage from recorded image data. For heritage structures in seismic zones, the first step in ontology development is analyzing available earthquake information about the event and the damage information. The resulting model will create links between information items, for example relating the extent of the damage of an element to the earthquake magnitude and its distance from the epicenter. The ontology may also include collected images from previous earthquake events, with links to the objects in each image. Special tools will focus on selecting sub-models to be included in a machine learning model. For example, if the learning objective is to identify the damage and its extent from an image, then the rules will select the features in the model that relate to structural damage and identify each type of damage. It is hoped that this work will help develop learning systems that speed up processing of large volumes of image damage data collected from heritage sites.

‘We are not in the same boat’: Representations of disaster and recovery in India

‘Representations’ of recovery refer to the creation, circulation, reinforcement and subversion of ideas about what should be done in the months and years after a hazard has struck. The research reported in this paper outlines how contrasting and, in some cases, openly contested narratives can emerge in society around the nature and causes of the event, the impacts and needs of the affected population, and the priorities and effectiveness of recovery processes. We worked in three states in India – Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala – collecting and collating a range of information on ideas, experiences and debates about disaster recovery from people in disaster-affected communities, from governmental and non-governmental organisations, from reports in the media, from academic studies and from official documentation. These related to major hazard events over the last two decades as well as recent events that hit the states prior to or during the course of the research.Though there is much variation between disaster cases in the pattern of representations by different actors, there are some discernible elements that do tend to work together to generate an effect on outcomes, often in ways that not only side-line livelihood and wellbeing priorities of disaster-affected people but also sometimes downplay or even negate the needs and rights of specific social groups. Managing disaster recovery is a hugely challenging task. However, it is not well served if the ways in which impacts and recovery needs are articulated lead to the effective exclusion of certain sectors, social groups, needs and concerns from full consideration, or to the blocking of alternative perspectives such as proactive approaches to future risk reduction. Key in this, we maintain, is the need to shift representations of recovery to better match the needs and voices of those most affected.

Infrastructure planning emergency levels of service for the Wellington region, Aotearoa New Zealand – A preliminary framework

Elements of a potential emergency response to a major hazard event can be identified early in the response planning process. Having goals for emergency provision of services, particularly infrastructure, would provide clear planning goals and actions for emergency responders. Agreed goals would also help residents more fully understand the likely nature of the service provisions following a major hazard event, allowing them to plan for events and resulting infrastructure outages. This paper proposes a set of ‘planning emergency levels of service’ based in literature and developed by practitioners that could be used to understand post-event planning and actions, across the critical infrastructure sectors. The resulting framework contains proposed planning emergency levels of service for the energy, telecommunications, transport, and water sectors. With potential local adjustment, this framework may be more widely applicable for other high-income regions. Limitations of the framework include that it has been developed based on literature and emergency management professionals' opinions and requires more research to ascertain its operational applicability.

Information fusion to automatically classify post-event building damage state

Post-event reconnaissance missions are conducted after each major natural hazard event to collect valuable and perishable data. Teams of engineers and scientists are deployed to collect data, and in particular visual data (images), to support particular lines of inquiry, or to identify new lines of inquiry, that may lead to new knowledge about the best practices for the design of civil infrastructure. Visual data, combined with computer vision methods, can be a valuable tool for accelerating and automating these processes. Together they provide the means to more easily use the data, and organize the data sets so that they can be discovered in a search and reused. The focus of this paper is the development of an automated technique to classify the overall damage state of a building based on a typical set of reconnaissance images collected from a single building in the field. The motivating task is the collection of data and classification of damage into broad categories, such as those needed for computing the Hassan index (Pujol et al., 2020). The method adopts a naïve Bayes fusion algorithm (Altınçay, 2005) to combine the data, and an integrated sampling technique to reduce the computational time without compromising the quality of the results. Validation is performed using 29,543 past reconnaissance images from 720 buildings in different parts of the world that was collected, in part, for determination of the Hassan index.

Analysis of the impact of a pandemic on the control of the process safety risk in major hazards industries using a Fault Tree Analysis approach

The control of the risks associated with major hazard events is critical to the safe and continuous operation of the process industry. Over the last decades, the process industry has been successful at establishing and implementing robust Process Safety Management (PSM) systems to prevent and mitigate the consequences of such major hazard events. While there exist some industry guidelines developed relatively recently for events initiated by natural disasters and security-related threats, for initiating events like outbreaks of pathogens and pandemics, there is currently a clear lack of understanding of the impact of the restrictions and disruption caused by a pandemic on the ability of companies operating major hazard facilities to keep controlling the risks associated to their hazardous operations. Moreover, there is no industry guideline on how to account for such an impact in PSM systems for process safety hazards. The recent COVID-19 outbreak caused serious disruptions to normal operations that have challenged industry in their ability to control risks.The objective of this paper is to perform an analysis of the impact of a pandemic situation on the implementation of selected elements of PSM systems related to the identification and evaluation of the risks of a major hazard and their control. The approach chosen involves the analysis of the root causes of the failure of the selected PSM elements using a Fault Tree Analysis method. The findings provide the first steps in the establishment of recommendations for the upgrade of PSM systems to face events such as pandemics.

Protecting the Historic Buildings of Mexico: The Barrel Vault of San Agustin Church in Morelia

AbstractHeritage in Mexico is endangered due to exposure to major hazard events and lack of maintenance. The level of knowledge necessary to evaluate structural behavior of historic buildings is ge...

Major accident prevention illustrated by hydrocarbon leak case studies: A comparison between Brazilian and Norwegian offshore functional petroleum safety regulatory approaches

Despite laws, regulations, or risk management tools designed to avoid loss events, a hydrocarbon leak (HCL) in an offshore oil and gas platform11Also mentioned in this paper as ‘offshore platform’ or ‘platform’. is a major hazard event that reveals failures in risk control. In addition, similarities between different HCLs challenge the efficiency of current improvement mechanisms and the completeness of applied risk management practices. Accident causation models sustain that different roles in different levels, including regulators, companies, and the work environment, create the necessary conditions to a loss event, and therefore should be part of the accident analysis. This paper analyzes similar HCLs occurred in Norwegian and Brazilian offshore platforms to compare the regulatory approaches to risk control, aiming to identify influences related to the recurrence of HCLs in functional regulatory regimes (FRRs). As a result, each HCL among case studies consists of human errors that occurred while offshore crews were operating unsafe systems created by improper design or changes to address operational demands. An inappropriate context may support the impairment of safeguards that may not always be available or reliable in an environment which has as particular aspects the remoteness and the need to be self-sufficient. As a consequence, unsafe systems impose safety rules to offshore personnel and more relevance to human performance in the overall risk picture. In FRRs, the combination of regulatory requirements and enforcement activities is part of the safety context and influence risk owners’ behavior. The current comparison identifies differences between Brazilian and Norwegian regulatory regimes that may influence safety in offshore systems, as well as risk constraints related to human performance, which is strongly dependent on influencing factors such as safety culture.

Public interest and participation in planning and infrastructure decisions for disaster risk management

Engaging communities in the selection of acceptable actions for mitigating and responding to disasters is a core part of the current international agenda (underpinned by the United Nations Sendai Framework) regarding disaster risk reduction. Evidence from around the globe suggests that specific efforts to engage in dialogue with communities regarding disaster risk, particularly in the absence of a major hazard event, has had limited success. This paper expands on observations of earthquake recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand, which has a relatively advanced institutional framework for managing disaster risk. It demonstrates that pre- and post-disaster contexts present different but related challenges for engaging communities, such as limited public awareness/interest and the resourcing and time required for bespoke engagement efforts. It is proposed that disaster risk reduction needs to be higher on the strategic agenda of local governments before a major hazard occurs, where a core purpose of their role should not just be to act on behalf of the local community, but to ensure that understanding risk becomes part of the everyday vernacular of city governance. The findings highlight the significance of problem structuring in consultation: understanding the structure of policy or the engineering design problem with respect to available scientific knowledge and values of the affected communities will help local governments determine the required consultation process. This may be purely technically driven and relying solely on expert decision-making or something necessitating greater community involvement.

Adoption of natural disaster preparedness and risk reduction measures by business organisations in Small Island Developing States - A Caribbean case study

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean continue to experience natural disasters which result in loss of life, as well as severe financial losses and economic distress despite the sustained efforts of regional and international agencies to promote disaster risk reduction. Main productive activities, including tourism and agriculture, are usually severely affected by these events, with consequent negative effects on the host economies. The disposition of business enterprises to take natural disaster risk management action is likely to be a factor in attenuating the severity of outcomes from natural hazard events.This study examines the risk reduction and preparedness measures implemented by a sample of business entities in two Caribbean SIDS, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada which have different natural hazard exposures and natural disaster experience. The results indicate areas of deficiency, particularly with respect to risk reduction. The findings also suggest that the responses are influenced mainly by the nature of the business and the characteristics of the organisations, rather than by natural disaster exposure and experience. Recommendations are offered for public policy initiatives that may successfully motivate the business sector to assist in reducing severe natural disaster effects from major natural hazard events in the Caribbean.

Deep learning-based classification of earthquake-impacted buildings using textual damage descriptions

To make informed decisions and have a well-coordinated response to a major hazard event, a rapid assessment of the spatial distribution and severity of building damage is needed. To this end, the long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning method is applied to classify building damage based on textual descriptions of damage. The damaged state of an individual building is classified using the ATC-20 tags (red, yellow and green). The application of the LSTM approach is demonstrated using building damage descriptions recorded following the 2014 South Napa, California earthquake. The dataset, which consists of 3423 buildings (1552 green tagged, 1674 yellow tagged, 197 red tagged), is randomly divided into training and testing subsets. A predictive model is established using the training set and the performance of this model is evaluated with the test set. An overall accuracy of 86% is achieved when the deep learning model is used to identify the ATC-20 tags for the test set. Despite some noted limitations, the study highlights the overall potential of using the LSTM method to rapidly assess building cluster damage using textual information, which can be generated by building professionals, stakeholders or social media platforms.

Insurance models and climate risk assessments in a historical context

Adaptation to the consequences of climate change has developed into a growing field of concern for the insurance business. However, climate-related risk is not entirely a new field in insurance. Historically, a large number of insurance organisational choices and strategies have been used to mitigate the financial impact of extreme events and uncertainties associated with climate change. Taking the case of forests in Sweden, this article reviews the ways in which climate-related risks such as storm/wind and fire risks have been assured. The study shows that climate-related risks have generally increased over time and that major hazard events have been decisive for strategy and organisation choices. Twentieth-century developments show that corporate insurance coverage increased due to higher levels of anticipated risk, while self-insurance and public insurance were reduced. However, in more recent times the expansion of corporate insurance has stagnated. Increased premiums and tighter terms following historically extreme weather events have led government and forest owners to assume more climate risks.

Evidence for enhanced debris-flow activity in the Northern Calcareous Alps since the 1980s (Plansee, Austria)

Debris flows are among the most important natural hazards. The Northern Calcareous Alps with their susceptible lithology are especially affected by a double digit number of major hazard events per year. It is hypothesised that debris-flow intensity has increased significantly in the last decades in the Northern Calcareous Alps coincident to increased rainstorm frequencies, but yet there is only limited evidence. The Plansee catchment exposes extreme debris-flow activity due to the intensely jointed Upper Triassic Hauptdolomit lithology, being responsible for most of the debris-flow activity in the Northern Calcareous Alps. The debris flows feed into a closed sediment system, the Plansee Lake, where Holocene/Lateglacial sedimentation rates, rates since the late 1940s and recent rates can be inferred accurately. Using aerial photos and field mapping, the temporal and spatial development of eight active debris-flow fans is reconstructed in six time intervals from 1947, 1952, 1971, 1979, 1987, 2000 and 2010 and mean annual debris-flow volumes are calculated. These are compared with mean Holocene/Lateglacial debris-flow volumes derived from the most prominent cone whose contact with the underlying till is revealed by electrical resistivity tomography (ERT). Debris-flow activity there increased by a factor of 10 from 1947–1952 (0.23±0.07·103m3/yr) to 1987–2000 (2.41±0.66·103m3/yr). Mean post-1980 rates from all eight fans exceed pre-1980 rates by a factor of more than three coinciding with enhanced rainstorm activity recorded at meteorological stations in the Northern Calcareous Alps. The frequency of rain storms (def. 35mm/d) has increased in the study area on average by 10% per decade and has nearly doubled since 1921. Recent debris-flow activity is also 2–3 times higher than mean Holocene/Lateglacial rates. The strong correlation between the non-vegetated catchment area and the annual debris-flow volume might indicate a decadal positive feedback between enhanced rainstorm activity and debris flows. Here we investigate the temporal and spatial development of debris-flow fans to better understand the sensitivity of alpine catchments to heavy rainfall events in the context of climate change.

Earthquake impact on utilities: planning for recovery

The first step towards improving a city's resilience is to understand the hazards it faces and assess their potential impact. The Wellington Lifelines Group in New Zealand is engaged in doing this exercise for the metropolitan area of the Wellington region, New Zealand. It consists of 20 utility operators and civil defence agencies that facilitate planning for major natural hazard events. This allows utility providers to understand the risks they face, mitigate them where practical with physical upgrades, and carry out emergency planning where services are likely to be seriously disrupted. This paper describes the work of the group and its 2012 report summarising the impact of a major earthquake on energy, transport, water and telecommunications utilities within metropolitan Wellington. The report outlined emergency planning projects in progress or proposed, thereby providing a snapshot of Wellington's current and projected preparedness to restart key services after a major disaster.

Social vulnerability to natural hazards in Indonesia: driving factors and policy implications

Indonesia is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and situated at the joining point of four major world tectonic plates. Regions of Indonesia are highly prone to various natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Some recent major natural hazard events are the 2004 tsunami in Aceh and Nias and the 2010 Mount Merapi volcanic eruptions in Central Java. In parallel with advancement in knowledge of the existing hazards, the importance of social aspects of vulnerability in mitigating natural hazards has been acknowledged by the Indonesian government. However, to date, there is no institutionalized effort for assessing social vulnerability to natural hazards that would cover all the districts of Indonesia. Accordingly, no comprehensive profile of social vulnerability is available as basis information for developing strategies to prevent larger risk and losses and reduce vulnerability of communities in Indonesia. Only a few studies have been conducted in Indonesia on this field. This study attempts to fill this gap by quantifying the social vulnerability of Indonesian districts to natural hazards, determining its driving factors and mapping its variations. The social vulnerability index (SoVI) approach is utilized in this study. Three main driving factors affecting social vulnerability in Indonesia are found: ‘socioeconomic status and infrastructure,’ ‘gender, age and population growth’ and ‘family structure.’ The combination of SoVI with thematic map utilizing ArcView GIS can be used to identify districts with relative high social vulnerability level. The results can support the prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery programs of the impacts of natural hazards in Indonesia.

Spatial strategies for flood vulnerability analysis and long term scenario with geographic information system (GIS) in Sirajganj, Bangladesh

Flood is a natural hazard resulting from extreme meteorological events which cause an unexpected threat to human lives and properties. Flood stems from the probability that a major hazard event will occur in a well-defined area and it will impacts negatively, in particular on the people and their welfare. Flood protection planning is a very important step which helps not only to rescue the people affected by flood but also to mitigate the effects of these calamitous events and to take necessary preventive measures. Geographic Information System (GIS) is a useful tool to carry out methods of environmental management. With Remote Sensing (RS) techniques, GIS helps in (i) bringing forth hidden patterns in a dataset (ii) performing queries (iii) storing, editing and retrieving (converting) data in maps, (iv) preparing exceedingly ‘expressive’ maps to facilitate survey, spatial modeling, analysis and decision-making. This paper aims to take stock of the GIS capabilities which are particularly relevant to Flood projection for determining a suitable location to build a dam on the basis of 50 years projected data and determining flood vulnerability in Sirajganj area, in Bangladesh, by using a vulnerability analysis. Key words: Sirajganj, remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), vulnerability analysis.

The public's preparedness: self-reliance, flashbulb memories, and conservative values.

We surveyed how many US residents engaged in 6 preparedness activities and measured the relationship between engagement and personal experience in hazard events, flashbulb memories of major events, self-reliance, and other indicators of a conservative philosophy. We used random digit dialing for national landline (75%) and cell phone (25%) surveys of 1930 US residents from July 6, 2011, to September 9, 2011; 1080 of the sample lived near 6 US Department of Energy nuclear waste management facilities and 850 were a national random sample. The median respondent engaged in 3 of the 6 activities; those who disproportionately engaged in 4 or more had experienced a hazard event, had distressing and strong flashbulb memories of major hazard events, and had strong feelings about the need for greater self-reliance. The results for the national and US Department of Energy site-specific surveys were almost identical. A cadre of US residents are disproportionately engaged in disaster preparedness, and they typically have stronger negative memories of past disasters and tend to be self-reliant. How their efforts can or should be integrated into local preparedness efforts is unclear.

From the Editors

From the Editors

A methodology for assessing underground coal mines for high safety-related risk

In 2008 the authors developed a methodology for assessing underground coal mines for high risk for major-hazard events. It focused on major hazard-related violations of safety standards associated with high-risk conditions. Later using the same stratified pilot sample of 31 mines, injury measures and MSHA citation data were combined into a Safe Performance Index (SPI). Using 2009 data, the database was expanded to 107 mines, which is a 30% sampling of all underground coal mines. The SPI was used to assess the relative safety-related risk of mines, including by mine-size category. The methodology can be used to assist companies, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, or state agencies in targeting mines with high risk for serious injuries and elevated citations for remediation of their violation and/or injury experience.