152 9.

1 Introduction

Chapter Contents

Introduction 152
9.1 Emergency planning to protect the 9.2 Planning for emergencies 155
environment 153

of which would not normally be considered likely to be a

Introduction
Much of the content of the previous chapters has been
about avoiding pollution. If an organisation is well run
and all the rules and suggestions for controlling opera-
tions are followed then the risks of causing pollution are
low. However things can go wrong. Most major pollution
events have one or more of several common causes and
often they could have been avoided or planned for better.
An organisation may also be responsible for, or at least
involved in or associated with, pollution remote from its
own site; for example, an accident involving transport of
its potentially hazardous material on a busy motorway
in an urban area. Some examples of previous significant
global events that attracted widespread publicity were
listed in Box 1.1 of which some were on sites and oth-
ers involved goods being transported. The Environment
Agency reported that, for England and Wales in 2015, seri-
ous pollution incidents had fallen to the lowest level ever
recorded at 499. Under half of these were from companies
regulated by them. This implies that over 250 incidents
were from those companies that were unregulated, most
pollution risk. They are unlikely to be large multinational
companies conducting high-risk operations. However,
although the risks from the larger regulated companies are
low, the consequences are probably more serious.
A common link between some incidents is that the
environmental damage is often associated with other
issues such as accidents and even deaths as a result of
poor health and safety practices. This is true of some of
the incidents shown in Box 1.1. The investigation reports
usually confirm that there may be some common prob-
lems with the management and culture of the organisa-
tion. Some of the issues in avoiding and planning for pol-
lution emergencies ought to be similar to those involved
in avoiding and planning for other accidents. As with
other aspects of an EMS, there are opportunities from
standardising some of the procedures and paperwork
with those for health and safety.
Emergency plans need to take account of the whole
range of activities that an organisation is involved in
and to identify the risks with the potential to cause an
emergency situation. The main risk factors are shown
in Box 9.1 and many of these have been mentioned in

Box 9.1  Some common causes of pollution of the environment

■■ Poor design, manufacture or construction of plant and equipment.
■■ Failure of power supply causing pumps, monitoring and control equipment or other items to stop
working.
■■ Failure of pipework or containment vessels due to accidental damage, corrosion or high pressure.
■■ Dangerous or uncontrolled conditions within plant leading to explosion, fire or other damage.
■■ Overloading of plant or equipment.
■■ Failure of monitoring and instrumental equipment.
■■ Failure of automatic systems for emergency shutdown.
■■ Operators failing to follow procedures.
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■■ Spills and leaks of liquids or gases.

■■ Illegal activity such as liquid effluent discharges to the wrong point or connection.
■■ Over-filling of tanks.
■■ Failure to provide adequate storage and bunding for liquids.
■■ Disruption by extreme weather such as storm or site flood.
■■ Interference by vandals or others with ill intent.
■■ Damage to plant caused by construction, maintenance or other activity on site.
■■ Traffic accidents on site or involving transport of materials away from the site.
■■ Mismanagement of waste.
■■ Inadequate segregation of materials including wastes leading to reactions that emit fumes or cause
fire.

Waters, B. (2020). Introduction to environmental management : For the nebosh certificate in environmental management. Taylor & Francis Group.
Created from griffith on 2023-07-18 20:39:07.