Ethics and Values

Ethical Violations in Disaster Management

Submitted to: Prof. Akash Joshi

Roll No.:….

17 B I C 007

17 BIC035

17 BIC057

17 B I C 059

17 B I C 060

17 B I C 061
 Bihar Train Derailment
On June 6, 1981, in the state of Bihar a passenger train carrying
more than 800 passengers between the towns of Mansi and
Saharsa, derailed and plunged into the River Bagmati, while it
was crossing a bridge. Widely regarded as one of the worst
disasters in the history of Indian Railways, the accident claimed
the lives of over 500-800 people.
Rescue operations after the derailment were terribly
mismanaged with help for the fallen passengers arriving long
after the incident with little equipment to provide assistance to
the hundreds of people struggling in the river.
After five days, more than 200 bodies were recovered, with
hundreds more missing that were feared washed away by the
river. Estimates of total deaths range from 500 to 800 or more.
The accident is among the deadliest-ever rail accidents on
record.
The investigative body set up to look into this accident failed to
come up with anything more concrete than a few theories as to
the reasons behind the accident. While no official cause was
declared, the body did provide a few theo ries, the most
acceptable of which was that the train’s engineer sharply applied
the brakes to avoid a cow that had suddenly walked onto the
tracks.
This sharp braking of the train combined with the slippery
conditions of the tracks due to the torrential rains that had
plagued that area for a few days were the most likely causes of
the derailment.
The high death toll was attributed to the deadly conditions of the
river that had swelled up after the long spell of rain, the
incompetency of the rescue officials, the lack of proper rescue
equipment as supplied by the Bihar government and rail
authorities and the long time it took for the first responders to
reach the incident site.
All these problems combined into one big disaster that claimed
the lives of over 600 people and is till date, regarded as the worst
railway disaster in history.
 Three Mile Island Accident
The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28, 1979, in
reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating
Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near
Harrisburg, in the United States of America.
It was the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear
power plant history. The incident was rated a five on the seven-
point International Nuclear Event Scale: Accident with wider
consequences .
The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary
system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in
the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear
reactor coolant to escape.
The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure
of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant
accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as
human-computer interaction design oversights relating to
ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant's user
interface.
In particular, a hidden indicator light led to an operator manually
overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the
reactor because the operator mistakenly believed that there was
too much coolant water present in the reactor and causing the
steam pressure release.
The accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among
activists and the general public. It has been cited to have been a
catalyst to the decline of a new reactor construction program, a
slowdown that was already underway in the 1970s.
The partial meltdown resulted in the release of radioactive gases
and radioactive iodine into the environment. Anti-nuclear
movement activists expressed worries about regional health
effects from the accident.
An tribunal set up to look into the Three Miles Disaster described
it as "unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable and
unavoidable. It’s chairman Charles Perrow concluded that the
failure at Three Mile Island was a consequence of the system's
i m m e ns e c om p l e xi t y .
Such modern high-risk systems, he stated, were prone to
failures however well they were managed. It was inevitable that
they would eventually suffer what he termed a 'normal accident'.
Therefore, he suggested, we might do better to contemplate a
radical redesign, or if that was not possible, to abandon such
technology entirely.
 Angers Bridge Disaster
Angers Bridge, also called the Basse-Chaîne Bridge, was a
suspension bridge over the Maine River in Angers, France. It
was designed by Joseph Chaley and Bordillon, and built
between 1836 and 1839. The bridge collapsed on 16 April 1850,
while a battalion of French soldiers was marching across it,
killing over 200 of them.
The bridge spanned 102 m (335 ft), with two wire cables carrying
a deck 7.2 m (24 ft) wide. Its towers consisted of cast iron
columns 5.47 m (17.9 ft) tall.
Soldiers stationed in the region frequently used the bridge, and
two battalions of the same regiment had crossed earlier that day.
The third battalion arrived during a powerful thunderstorm when
the wind was making the bridge oscillate.
When the soldiers began to cross, their bodies acted as sails,
further catching the wind. As usual in crossing that bridge, the
soldiers had been ordered to break step and to space
themselves farther apart than normal.
However, their efforts to match the swayi ng and keep their
balance may have caused them to involuntarily march with the
same cadence, contributing to the resonance. In any case, the
oscillation increased.
At a time when the bridge was covered with 483 soldiers and
four other people (though the police had prevented many
curiosity seekers from joining the march), the upstream
anchoring cable on the right bank broke in its concrete mooring,
three to four meters underground, with a noise like "a badly done
volley from a firing squad".
The adjacent downstream cable broke a second later, and the
right-bank end of the deck fell, making the deck slope very
steeply and throwing soldiers into the river.
The failure was attributed to dynamic load due to the storm and
the soldiers, particularly as they seem to have been somewhat
in step, combined with corrosion of the anchors for the main
cables. The cable anchorages at Angers were found to be highly
vulnerable, as they were surrounded by cement.
 Aliso Canyon Gas Leak
The Aliso Canyon gas leak was a massive natural gas leak that
was discovered by SoCalGas employees on October 23, 2015.
Gas was escaping from a well within the Aliso Canyon's
underground storage facility in the Santa Susana Mountains
near Porter Ranch, Los Angeles.
This second-largest gas storage facility of its kind in the United
States belongs to the Southern California Gas Compan y, a
subsidiary of Sempra Energy. On January 6, 2016, Governor
Jerry B rown issued a state of emergency.
On February 11, 2016, the gas company reported that it had the
leak under control. On February 18, 2016, state officials
announced that the leak was permanently plugged.
An estimated 97,100 tonnes of methane and 7,300 tonnes of
ethane were released into the atmosphere, The initial effect of
the release increased the estimated 5.3 Gt of methane in the
Earth's atmosphere by about 0.002%, diminishing to half that in
6-8 years.
It was widely reported to have been the worst single natural gas
leak in U.S. history in terms of its environmental impact. Local
residents have reported headaches, nausea, and severe
nosebleeds. About 50 children per day saw school nurses for
severe nosebleeds. There have been more than usual eye, ear
and throat infections.
By December 25, 2015, more than 2,200 families from the Porter
Ranch neighbourhood had been temporarily relocated, and more
than 2,500 households were still being processed. The
community of Eight Mile, Alabama had a spill of the natural gas
odorant within their community in 2008. Residents continue to
experience these symptoms under their long-term exposure to
mercaptan.
 Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

The Chernobyl disaster, also referred to as the Chernobyl

accident, was a catastrophic nuclear accident. It occurred on 25–
26 April 1986, in the No. 4 light water graphite moderated reactor
at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the now-abandoned
town of Pripyat, in northern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,
Soviet Union, approximately 104 km (65 mi) north of Kiev.
The event occurred during a late-night safety test which
simulated a station blackout power-failure, in the course of which
safety systems were intentionally turned off.
A combination of inherent reactor design flaws and the reactor
operators arranging the core in a manner contrary to the
checklist for the test, eventually resulted in uncontrolled reaction
conditions.
Water flashed into steam generating a destructive steam
explosion and a subsequent open-air graphite fire. This fire
produced considerable updrafts for about nine days. These
lofted plumes of fission products into the atmosphere.
The estimated radioactive inventory that was released during
this very hot fire phase approximately equalled in magnitude the
airborne fission products released in the initial destructive
explosion. This radioactive material precipitated onto parts of the
western USSR and Europe.
The Chernobyl Forum predicts that the eventual death toll could
reach 4,000 among those exposed to the highest levels of
radiation (200,000 emergency workers, 116,000 evacuees and
270,000 residents of the most contaminated areas).
This figure is a total causal death toll prediction, combining the
deaths of approximately 50 emergency workers who died soon
after the accident from acute radiation syndrome, 15 children
who have died of thyroid cancer and a future predicted total of
3935 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukaemia
 Importance of Ethical Standards in
Disaster Management
In ethics, values denote the degree of importance of some thing
or action, with the aim of determining what actions are best to do
or what way is best to live (normative ethics), or to describe the
significance of different actions.
Value systems are proscriptive and prescriptive beliefs, they
affect ethical behavior of a person or are the basis of their
intentional activities.
Often primary values are strong and seconda ry values are
suitable for changes. What makes an action valuable may in turn
depend on the ethical values of the objects it increases,
decreases or alters. An object with "ethic value" may be termed
an "ethic or philosophic good".
Disasters are unpredictable, acute situations which cause
extensive damage, destruction, and suffering, and which often
cannot be dealt with by the local community on its own.
The people responding to disasters (victims, health care
personnel, humanitarian aid workers or military personnel) often
record disillusionment and a kind of ethical frustration with
making ethical decisions during disasters.
Ethical practices help to provide stability for organizations in a
rapidly changing and increasingly complex world. In contrast to
day-to-day emergencies, disasters are charact erized by a
relative lack of time and resources and many people are trying
to do quickly what they do not ordinarily do, in an environment
with which they are not familiar
Developing a preventive ethics approach in this pre-disaster
phase, also helps to reduce conflicts during the crisis .Within this
scope, capacity building to increase knowledge and skills of
disaster relief professionals and the populations at risk,
developing disaster recovery plans, practicing and updating
these plans as needed, building strong partnerships among
organizations and institutions with potential duties in disaster
relief, preparing legislations and manuals as to better respond to
the ethical conflicts in disasters as well as informing all partners
about this ethical framework are c rucial.
During disasters, there is often a need to track the responsibility
of professional organizations or governmental bodies for the
ethical decisions and actions they make.
In the chaos of disaster, there is a need to establish order and
the basic mechanism for relieving the community from the
negative effects of the disaster (e.g. setting up camps,
organizing disaster relief and health care teams, collecting
resources, materials and food ). Many decisions are made
collectively.