Industrial risk

Abstract

This introductory chapter begins with the background of this research, explaining in brief the context of risk informed decision making for planning the uses of land around hazardous installations. Thereafter, subsequent sections discuss the research problem, the objectives and the methodological approaches that have been conceptualized for the purpose of this research. BackgroundOn the early morning of December 3 rd , 1984, an accident occurred at the Union Carbide pesticide-manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India triggered the world's worst industrial catastrophe. A leak of 41 metric tons of acutely toxic Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) from a 33 metre long atmospheric vent-line within 90 minutes resulted in exposure of hundreds of thousands of people living in the neighbouring area of about 50 km 2 (Lees, 1996;Singh et al., 1987). Within seconds, the lethal substance silently spread towards the shanty towns near the plant, with a population of more than half a million people. It was reported that in the railway colony about 2 km from the plant, where nearly 10,000 people lived, by the end of the day over 3000 people died and many were injured (Eckerman, 2005;Mannan et al., 2005;Shrivastava, 1995). Although, officially, the government put the immediate death toll at just under 4,000 people, but the unofficial estimates vary from anywhere between 8,000 to 10,000 to much higher numbers with 15,000 to 20,000 premature deaths reportedly occurring in the subsequent two decades (Broughton, 2005). Besides, thousands of people became disabled together with temporary and minor injured cases. In any case, it was a watershed event and qualifies as one of the worst manmade disasters that the world has witnessed to this day (Ayres et al., 1987;Chouhan, 2005).