In the world of progression, Risk has become a daily presence for individuals, they these are or not involved in economic activities. Risk may be for the individual or sometimes it may be for a group of people. Risks affecting higher number of people called disasters. These disasters may be natural or man-made. In the world of science these disasters lead to serious economic losses or casualties (Lee, Park, & Shin, 2009). These risks can be mitigated by the use of effective risk management system for their assessment and mitigation. In this report three case studies are discussed about their different aspects for the risk management assessment and mitigation. Three case studies, this report is discussing, are 1) Bhopal Gas Disaster (1984, India), 2) Texas City Refinery Explosion (2005, USA), 3) Deep Water Horizon Oil Disaster (Gulf of Mexico 2010). All the three incidents were man-made disaster and result of a poor management of assessment and mitigation for the risks associated with the incidents.
Risk management is a process of identifying, assessing and preparing effective strategies for the mitigation of these possible risks associates with the respective project or site. In the man-made disasters like “TIANJIN CHINA EXPLOSION” as discussed in the previous assignment risk management has follow a systematic management process to avoid such incidents. The whole process of risk management comprises of three main steps as risk analysis, risk evaluation, and risk mitigation using proper strategy.
The Bhopal gas tragedy was an industrial man-made disaster which took place on 2nd December 1984 in the night (Mishra, et al., 2009). Uranium Corporation of India Limited, at that time, was the subsidiary under the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), the US company union. This tragedy was the result of leakage of the dangerous methyl isocynate gas and other toxic products of the plant (UCC, Bhopal Gas Tragedy Information, 2018). In this tragedy the official immediate death report states that there were 2,259 casualties on the spot and at that time government of Madhya Pradesh confirmed 3,787 deaths directly or indirectly related to the incident. In 2010, after 30 years of the incident, the toxic material remains and affected many lives. This result in leading, the population exposed to that incident, to give birth to physically and mentally disable children (Taylor, 2014). Such accidents are hazardous for the mankind and the environment as well.
The incident of Bhopal gas leakage happed due to the poor risk management of the plant. The explosion at site did not only affect the mankind but it also affected the environment very abruptly. This environmental hazard itself is the cause of birth of physically and mentally disabled children. The management of the plant did not follow the standards specified for the chemical plants in such populated area. This management results in the poor design of the gag scrubber, flare tower, and water curtain which resulted in such a massive disaster (Narain & Bhusan, 2014). Proper assessment of the risk associated with the plant was not done by the management therefore, the poor design of the plant elements lead to the malfunction of hardware used in the plant.
Massive gas tragedy in Bhopal was a result of the miss management of the risks, and it is very important to predict such incidents and mitigate these using proper strategies by the risk management of the responsible industry or organization (Singh & Ghosh, 1987). Another set of the causes responsible for this incident were lack of information, lack of communication, lack of awareness of toxicity of the chemicals producing in the plant and many more (Dutta, 2017). This led us to the importance of a complex risk management to prevent such accidents in future. The tragedy causes birth of physically and mentally disabled children still after 33 years of the incident (ANI, 2017). Therefore, as per discussed in the previous assignment such a hazardous chemical plant needs a proper management system to be practiced in order to prevent such disasters. This management will assess the risks associated with the organization or unit, and implement the required strategies for the mitigation of such risks. This whole process can be followed by doing following things
Bhopal gas tragedy could be controlled or mitigated with an effective risk assessment. This assessment required to follow three simple steps to prevent the world from such hazardous accidents. These three steps are as:
In this assessment risk management has to identify the possibilities of the hazard that could take place on the sire. In this process management needs to inspect the unit condition, their stock of the hazardous material, and check the requirement for hardware repairing or replacement (Tummala & Schoenherr, 2011). In this way the management can understand the requirement of the chemical plant and can also find the possibility of any accident on the basis of condition of the production plant.
On the basis of risk identification, management has to assess the risks that could be associated with the identified possibilities. This assessment took place in the form of analysis of all the possibilities that could be happened due to each possible accident. The assessment of risk will provide the necessity of the precautions for further management of the risk (Wissem, 2013).
Once the management know about the possible risk and made their assessment, it is possible to control or mitigate the risk. When management get to know about the risk and its possibilities, essential possible precautionary strategies must be implemented by the management (Miller & Lessard, 2001). This strategy is defined for the precaution that need to be taken before the accident can take place. Bhopal gas tragedy could be mitigated or controlled to some extent, if these steps were followed by the risk management of the site. UCC finally permitted to undertake the clean-up work in year just peior to sale of its stock by UCC in 1994 (UCC, Remediation (Clean-up) of Bhopal Plant Site, 2018).
The Texas City Refinery Explosion was another man-made disaster occurred on 23rd March 2005.This time a cloud of hypercarbon vapour was ignited and exploded violently at the isomerization process unit of the IOSM at British Petroleum’s Texas City refinery in Texas City. In this tragedy 15 workers were killed and more than 170 people got injured also damaged several processing units of the refinery (CSB, 2005). This refinery was the second largest oil refinery in state and the third largest in United States (PM, 2005). The British Petroleum had accepted the full responsibility for the hazardous explosion and made some allowances for the victims of explosion directly or indirectly. Till October 2006, company has settles more than 1000 lawsuits which were related to the claims made by the victims. The accident costs the company $63,000 in fines (BBC, 2005).
The accident happened in Texas City, could be blamed on many failures, from hardware malfunctioning to human process. On 27th October 2005, the Chemical Safety Board of US issued its preliminary findings at a public meeting.
The explosion in Texas City Refinery was a man-made disaster, a result of poor management and lack of communication though out the whole process (Khan & Amyotte, Incident). The overfilling of the drums was a result of failed alarms and gauges but this disaster could be prevented or mitigated with the help of an effective communication system and observation skills (MacKenzie, Holmstrom, & Kaszniak, 2007). Refineries of this level have their standards to be followed through-out the whole process of refining the crude oil. An effective communication plan could have mitigated the accident. In this accident lack of effective communication plan was the main cause responsible for the incident. The management has to follow some essential steps to prevent this disaster as
Risk management system, responsible for such refineries or hazardous units, has to assess the risk on prior basis. This assessment of risk, as discussed in the previous assignment, is to be done with a proper analysis and observation skills especially in such hazardous chemical refineries (Ceryno, Scavarda, Klinebiel, & YuzGulec, 2013). In this case management has to use its observation skills and should analyse the starting process of unit before its start-up. Once management got to assess possible risk associated with the start-up process of IOSM, it could be possible to reduce the impact or the chance of accident happened could be mitigated. For this assessment following steps were needed to be followed by the risk management system.
In this step management has to analyse the complete process of any operation which is going to take place in near future. This step will provide the required information to calculate the possibilities of risks associated with the upcoming process.
Once the risk identified then is can assessed by the management to know its aftereffects and its impact on the whole system of the unit. This assessment is necessary to get to know the priorities of different risks to mitigate these. In this process at the possible action which can prevent the accident are analysed and made to be implemented (Jovanovic, Milijic, Dimitrova, & Mihajlovic, 2016).
When risk is identified and assessed, it should be controlled with effective strategy formation and implementation. In this case if the risk could be identified then it was possible to prevent the accident to take place by communicating the risk to operating unit of the IOSM operation (Shao, Yang, Tian, Ju, & Huang, 2013). Once they got to know about the problem the start-up process could be delayed and the explosion could be prevented.
Deep-water Horizon Oil Spill or we called Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill of 2010 is the largest oil spill in the history. This disaster began on 20th April 2010, and caused an explosion on the deep-water horizon oil rig which was located in the Gulf of Mexico. The site location of the oil rig was approximately 41 miles or 66 kilometres away from the coast of Louisiana. The Deep-water Horizon Oil Rig, owned and operated by offshore-oil-drilling company Transocean and leased by the giant oil company British Petroleum, was situated in the Macondo oil prospect in the Mississippi Canyon. The oil well below the site was located 4,993 feet (1,522 metre) deep in the sea and extended approximately 18,000 feet into the rock bed. Reports suggest that the explosion was result of poor construction work of sealing the well for later use. In this accident 11 workers were killed and 17 got injured. After two days of spilling the oil continuously and a series of explosions, on 22nd April the rig was capsized and sank down in the sea. After this the drilling mud has been injected through this in order to counter the upward pressure of oil and natural gas. Before the well was sealed, approximately 402 million barrels of oil and officials released 108 million gallon of corexit, kind of chemical dispersant used to break up the oil, dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
Results show that the greatest effect on mental health related to the context of disruption to participants, lives, work, family, and social engagement, with increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress (Osofsky, Osofsky, & Hansel, 2011). The largest Horizon Oil Spill in the history was caused due to poor construction of recently installed concrete core by the contractor Halliburton to seal the well for later use (Ferris, 2017). These seals are provided to the wells not in use, to prevent the later use of them and unnecessary leakage of the gas and oil through the well opening. For the same purpose this well was sealed using concrete core construction over the opening of the well. The concrete construction was poor in strength to withstand the pressure of natural gas because nitrogen gas was used, in the composing concrete work, as an admixture. This addition of nitrogen was as an admixture results in reducing the strength of concrete which was resulted in such a big disaster. But most of the oversights and mistakes can be summarised as a single failure, failure of the management. An effective communication plan could have mitigated the problem as the communication plan would take the matter or design of concrete into other construction experts of the organization and the issue could have been discussed and overcome by making required design changes. The accident would certainly have prevented with a better management of BP, Transocean and Halliburton improving skills off individual involved. This improvement was necessary to identify, evaluate, and communicate the risk they faced. This blowout in the deep-water was not a statistical inevitability (Anderson, et al., 2011).
The disaster occurred in 2010, was a result of poor risk management and poor maintenance of the standards. Communication plan is the most important element of risk management. The main cause, failure of the concrete core to withstand the pressure of natural gas, was a lack or seriousness for the risk management. The oil rig was leased to the British Petroleum, who previously suffered from such incidents, again made a mistake in their risk assessment process (Vaugham, 2018).
This accident could be prevented by proper quality checks of the concrete construction on regular basis. As per discussed in the previous assignment risks associated with any project must be assessed and an effective strategy in order to mitigate the risk at the initial stage only.
MMS requires all owners of offshore oil-handling, storage, or transportation facilities to prepare Oil Spill response plans (Anderson, et al., 2011). This requirement must be fulfilled by the company. MMS regulations provide details for elements of response plan (for emergency response plan, oil spill response equipment inventory, a calculation of worst-case discharge scenario, plan for dispersant use, in0situ burning plan, etc.) (Anderson, et al., 2011). In case of Dee-water Horizon Oil Spill Disaster, Horicon Rig management has to operate proactively for the construction work concern. If the management could inspect the construction work proactively they would be able to find out the risk possibilities. Therefore, only MMS agency could not be blamed in this particular case. The agency has made certain essential rules and regulations, now it was management’s responsibility to follow the regulations and practice the required risk identification process (Anderson, et al., 2011).
Risks involved in offshore oil spill rigs can be assessed in similar way as discussed in the previous assignment of the risk management of “Tianjin China Explosion” case study of a man-made disaster. The possibility of high pressure generation by the hyddrocarbons and natural gas deep in the well could have blown the well seal. This must be assessed at the time of construction designing.
BP attempted to activate the rig’s blow-out preventer (BOP), a fail-safe mechanism which was designed to cut the channel through which oil was drawn, but unfortunately the device malfunctioned. The forensics analysis of BOP determined that the set of blades called blind shear arms was designed to slice through the pipe carrying oil. But it had malfunctioned because the pipe had bent due to high pressure of rising oil and natural gas (Anderson, et al., 2011).
Conclusion
Unlike the individual project, regional era and management are classified as new strategies in risk management. In the era of technology, every project has involvement of both humans and technology. This combination needs an effective synchronization in their working operations to maintain the healthy working environment. This combination may results in rise of the risk due to some mismatch of working strategies. This possibility of arising risk needs to be resolved to mitigate the loss. Risks are the potential loss of life as well as the assets. These strategies of risk management resolve the multiple uncertainties of risk sources and their effect to prevent the mankind from such disasters. Every time, this kind of disasters happen they cause so much loss to the life, nature, and assets. Therefore, these accidents must be controlled with effective strategies to identify and mitigate the risks.
References
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