Technological Hazards

Technological Hazards
• Smith Ch 13
 Technological Hazards
• Artificial hazards due to a technological
failure
– slow-acting
– fast-acting
 Slow-Acting
• soil and water contamination
• air pollution
• occupational disease
• life-style disease
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of all
statistics."

-- Liza Minnelli
“Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a
very important part of your life.”
— Brooke Shields
Byssinosis victim, Greenville SC
Arsenic poisoning
Arsenic
London Smog Nov 1952
“It isn’t the pollution that’s harming the
environment. It’s the impurities in the air
and water that are doing it.”
-- Dan Quayle
Aral Sea
Bangkok
• Sudbury 1979
"Hollywood is the only place where you can
wake up in the morning and hear the birds
coughing in the trees."

-- Joe Frisco
Leaking USTs
• British sewage
sludge dumped
at sea 1980s
 Fast-Acting
• major fires
• structural failures
• transportation accidents
• industrial accident
 Major conflagrations
• 1666 Great Fire of London: 13,200 houses
destroyed
• 1871 Great Fire of Chicago: 18,000 homes
destroyed
Dutch firework disaster
Hagersville ON 1990
 London May 10-11 1941
• Heaviest air raid on London in WW2
• 35 Weeks into the London “Blitz”
• 541 German aircraft involved
– 700 tons of high explosive
– 86 tons of incendiaries
 London May 10-11 1941
• 1436 Civilians killed
• 1800 serious injuries
• 2200 fires started, 700 acres burned (bigger
than 1666)
• 11000 homes destroyed
 Major transport accidents
• 1912 Titanic: 1,500 dead
• 1914 Empress of Ireland
• Empire State
crash 1940s
 Mississauga Train Derailment
• November 1979 train carrying propane &
chlorine derails
• 250,000 evacuated
• Amoco Cadiz
1978
 Exxon Valdez
• Exxon pays $35 Billion US in
compensation for major oil spill in Alaskan
waters
• Tanker runs aground while captain drunk
 Major industrial accidents
• 1769 San Nazzaro gunpowder explosion:
3,000 dead
• 1858 Boiler explosion, London docks:
2,000 dead
• 1906 Courrieres coal mine explosion: 1,099
dead
• 1917 Halifax Explosion: 1,200+ dead
• Toronto Oil Tank
Fire 1911
 Cubatao, Brazil 25 Feb 1984
• 500 squatters die when petroleum spills
from industrial plant and ignites shanty
community
 Mexico City, 19 Nov 1984
• Liquified Petroleum Gas explosions at plant
adjoining poor neighbourhood
• 452 dead, 31,000 homeless, 300,000
evacuated
 Bhopal, India 2-3 Dec 1984
• India applying modern technology to
farming
• Leak of toxic Methyl Isocyanate gas from
Union Carbide agrochemicals plant
• Killed 2000 immediately, 6,400 total
• 34,000 blinded, 200,000 injured
• 200,000 refugees
 Bhopal
• Factory without US-standard safety
measures
• Large numbers of vulnerable people living
close to the plant
• No preparation to evacuate or protect
population
• Company able to offload much of the
responsibility onto India
 Bhopal
• Union Carbide eventually pays $470 million
US in compensation (1989)
• Around $500 per injured person, $2000 per
death
• Victims face corruption in Indian legal and
medical systems
 Bhopal
• Brought tighter controls in USA on
chemical companies
– US chemical companies shift production to
LDCs
 Exposure increases
• More people living in dense urban areas and
exposed to risk
• More powerful technologies
• Rapid pace of technological change:
– new hazards in places unfamiliar with them
 Road Deaths
• 70% of all road deaths now in LDCs
Dubai
 Globalization of industrial
technology
• Global spread of
industrialization
• Globalization of
commercial farming
– chemicals
• From mid 1980s LDCs
enter the big league for
industrial accidents
Pesticides in Singapore
Spreading DDT on a Toronto
Dump, Spring 1948
 Protection increases
• Engineering improves
• Safety features improved
• Improved safety regulation
– Less in LDCs
– Eroding in MDCs with
reductions in public
spending
 Chernobyl 25-26 April 1986
• Nuclear reactor accident in Belarus
• Flawed plant design plus human
incompetence
– water-cooled graphite-modified
• Radioactive steam blows the 1000 tonne
cover off the reactor
– fragments flung for 1 km
– plume of radioactive gas enters upper atmosphere
 Chernobyl 25-26 April 1986
• US satellite surveillance incomplete
– crucial hardware lost on the Space Shuttle
Challenger
• World has to observe the unfolding disaster on
an old LANDSAT satellite
– not designed to see things this small
– sees two reactors
• First western alarm: at a nuke plant in Sweden
 Chernobyl 25-26 April 1986
• 31+ die from radiation burns
– Kamikaze firefighting to bury the reactor
• 200+ seriously injured
• 135,000 permanently evacuated within 35
km radius
• Abandonment of Pripyat
 Chernobyl 25-26 April 1986
• Radioactive plume circles the globe within
2 weeks
• Heaviest fallout in high-rainfall northern
hemisphere
– contamination of the arctic and subarctic food
chains
Scrapbook of Technological
Hazards
Historic Waste Disposal
 Weston Rd & Black Creek
• Early C20th: flood-liable creek and quarries
• Some waste disposal, landfilling, cheap
housing
• Hurricane Hazel 1954: extensive flooding
• Black Creek placed in concrete channel
• Metro and York Township landfill the
quarries
 Weston Rd & Black Creek
• Expropriation of Porter Ave homes 1965
– Michael Vukovitz
 Weston Rd & Black Creek
• Feb 1965: Landfill-methane explosion on
Avon Ave
– garage explodes, man becomes human torch
• 1969: same garage explodes again
– different man becomes human torch
• Litigation: Gertson vs Borough of York
1973
– Gertson won
 Hamilton Waterfront 1970s
• Laidlaw’s Interflow subsidiary treating
hazardous liquids on Hamilton waterfront in
1970s
– Thermal treatment
– Transfer station
– Licensed to send region’s wastes to dump
 Upper Ottawa St Dump
• Wastes hauled to Upper Ottawa St Landfill
– operated by another Laidlaw company: KD
Disposals
• Upper Ottawa St Landfill leaks
– Red Hill Creek contaminated
– Region recently fined $500,000 for this
 Philip Services
• 1990s secured contract to operate
Hamilton’s water supply, sewage disposal
• 1990s secured approval for Taro landfill,
Stoney Creek
 Philip Services
• Taro Landfill accepts illegal plating wastes
from US
– Philip forcing city to allow Taro leachate in city
sewers
• Philip’s spills sewage into Harbour
• Philip abandons Hamilton’s blue-box
collection programme May 2001
– Leaves City to pick up the pieces
• Wonderful corporate behaviour
Global Acid Rain
 Technological Hazards
• Complex hazard spectrum
• Significant role of human factors
• Signs that the vulnerability and hazard
exposure reflect broad societal changes:
– urbanization
– global industrialization