Bhopal Gas Tragedy

Just moments after being given instructions to climb to a higher altitude “the captain stated, ‘Look at that crazy fuel flow indicator their on number four, see that?’” (TWA flight crash). Afterwards, in an investigation lead by the Nation Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) they concluded that the cause of the crash was due to the combustion of the mixture of air and fuel in the “center wing fuel tank” (TWA flight crash). It is no wonder why many people believe the cause of the crash was a fuel tank explosion. Later, the NTSB claimed that two worn down wires must have sparked in the fuel tank, exploding the whole plane (Cole 36). The NTSB also that the flammability in the central wing fuel tank, due to the hazardous mixture of air and fuel, was too high (TWA Flight 800). Based on the various tests and investigations of the crash, mechanical failure has remained one of the most accepted theories of the flight’s

With what happened on the Triangle Fire of 1911, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris should be blamed for the tragic aftermath and so many women dead with the fire. Their punishment for 146 females dying was very inadequate. Seeming how they did not take the proper safety precautions and their factory was not up to city codes. Blanck and Harris did not get charged of manslaughter or anything for the 146 females dying in this fire, though they definitely should have.

What’s important to examine is that before the Triangle Factory Fire is that that casualties from unsafe conditions were reported and expressed as a concern before. Where was the outrage that pushed for safer working conditions? The answer to that is that there were many times that people were upset with such conditions.

After the fire, the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were instantly frowned upon for the death of the 146 people who lost their lives in the Triangle Factory Fire. Following the detest, the owners declared that the building was incombustible, and that the fire should not have occurred, using the Department of Building's statement of the matter to enhance their claim. However, the public pressured the city with an ultimatum, and demanded that a trial take place. The rejection of this ultimatum would result in riots and cause an equal or greater number of lives to be lost than the Triangle Factory Fire. The city had no choice but to accept, and so the investigation began. The charge that was being forced onto Max Blanck and Isaac Harris was manslaughter in the second degree, and the first argument was that the doors to the stairwells should not be locked during work hours. The owners refuted this, claiming that they were only trying to stop theft. They did not fully trust the workers, and they were trying to prevent vandalism at the same time. The owners used the locked doors to inspect the bags of the workers to ensure no fabrics or other valuable materials were stolen from the workplace. One owner, Max Blanck, according to Cornell University, had no idea that the doors were locked, and thus, the argument was dropped. The next topic was that what started the fire. The majority of people, including Albert Marrin,

At first the workers tried to take the elevator to escape but it could only take so many before it broke down. After this, some people pried open the elevator doors and jumped down the elevator shaft to their deaths trying to get away from the fire. Other girls took the stairwell, but they found a locked door at the bottom so all of them ended up burning to death. Some employees took the fire escape but it was poorly built and constructed so it fell to the concrete with many people on it, killing all of them. The rest of the workers in the building jumped to their inevitable deaths to escape from the alternative of burning to death. Some of the people who were on the tenth floor escaped to safety on the roof of the building and survived. Two of these survivors were the owners of the factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. Even though there was a ton of evidence showing that these two were negligent for the fire, the court never indicted them for manslaughter which angered and upset the devastated families of the

The greatest lesson learned from this tragedy was the need for planned fire drills and accessible fire escapes. If the employers would have made it mandatory that all employees become familiar with the buildings layout, practice fire drills and know their closest fire escape, it would have aided the employees in the hour of despair. The biggest cause for death in this fire was a result of poor pre-fire planning. The building may be fire proof, but the people and contents inside are not.

Prior to the disaster, the company had been facing a financial crisis for many years because the sale of pesticides had been fallen (Joseph, Kaszniak and Long 2005, p. 544). Due to the budget cuts, many plant operators received insufficient training on operations and safety awareness (Mannan 2012, p. 2649). As shown in Figure 1, there was a decrease in the length of training programmes for plant operators from 18 months in 1975 to only one month in December 1984 (Chouhan 2005, p. 207). Therefore, with a lack of the knowledge of runaway reactions occurring in the storage tank when the accident happened, many workers could not immediately take any emergency action to lessen the risk of the MIC escape from the storage tank (Chouhan 2005, p. 207). To connect the tank with another

The main reason that could be attributed to the cause of the Chernobyl accident was due to the irregular condition of the reactor on the day.

The main reason for the mishap is by now well recognized (Petryna 1). However, initially the Chernobyl catastrophe baffled the minds of people in the 20th century and definitely left the people of Ukraine disordered while living in anxiety. Now, without question, the public knows that the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a disastrous combination of ignorance from the Ukrainians and complacency from the Soviets in control of Ukraine at the time. As according to American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, “…the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power." The immediate basis of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment (Rhodes "Chernobyl", PBS). While, the indirect source of the calamity was an industrial malfunction of a Soviet made nuclear-based machine. Ironically, the Chernobyl accident occurred during a test run, which was conducted to improve plant safety. This accident proved once more what experienced control engineers have all learned: that a process must be understood before it can be controlled. (Liptak “Control Global”). Engineers with no familiarity of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency, when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was

The disaster took place on April 1986, and was caused by inexperienced staff. When the power plant had to undergo a special test, to make sure that sufficient amount of cooling water would be supplied to the reactor in case of a power outage. However, the test had been delayed, because the national grid required the power output more than the expected time. Hence, the test was postponed after midnight where the night shift had to come. The night shift had little experience about such a test as most of them were electrical engineers rather than nuclear. On the other hand, the night shift had to perform the test before the grid needed the power again, otherwise they would have all been fined or fired. Consequently, lead to an unnecessary pressure on the personnel, which in turn increased the probability of making incorrect

The series of ethical issues that took place leading to the disaster are complex, and other factors such as economic and political issues arose after the catastrophe happened. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical issues that took place before the disaster happened, and investigate the moral obligations, social responsibility and justice at an individual and organizational level. The ethical dilemma is broken down into three categories, which include the company’s management priority to reduce costs and time, neglecting safety issues addressed by staff, human misjudgment and errors in neglecting pressure reading; and finally, overlooking the technical design flaws that were not tested by BP before installing to use. The

A single slip in action may cause lasting sorrow. A slight mistake in operation at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal of India causes a lot of deaths and injuries. What a tragedy it is. Undoubtedly, there must be something wrong with the management of the plant.

The causes of the accident was quite complex. In brief, it began with a closed bypass valve, which stopped the water flowing to the secondary main feed water pumps, once the steam generators could not receive water, they stopped and the reactor emergently shutdown. Control rods were inserted into the

Although the accident was caused by a mechanical failure, it spiralled out of control because of an insufficient safety system. BP acted inefficiently and their carelessness cost the lives of people and damaged the environment, nevertheless this does not mean they acted in an unethical way as

After the explosion an investigation was conducted to see what the cause of the explosion was. The investigators found that not only was Massey Energy at fault but so was the U.S. Department of Labor and its Mine Safety and Health Administration were at fault for failing to act decisively at the mine even after Massey was issued 515 citations for safety violations at the Upper Big Branch mine in 2009. Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy was aware of these violations but was still having workers work in these minds. It was also reported that some employees were being threatened with dismissal if they did not go into the mines. This is a problem that seemed to slip through the cracks, if the U.S. Department of Labor and Mine Safety and Health Administration would have continued to fine Massey Energy for their continued incompliance with the laws and eventually shut them down until the violations were fixed then this catastrophe could have been