A study on the determining role of timely emergency management based on Bhopal accident

The years 2014 and 2016 mark the anniversaries of two notable process accidents: respectively thirty years from the unparalleled Bhopal tragedy and forty years from the Seveso accident. These events shaped developments in process safety worldwide, so that after them risk analysis and legislation got applied more generally focusing on prevention and control of major chemical incidents. Even if completely different in their evolution according to "black swan" scenarios, these events cause us to recall that a more positive stance can and should be taken to emergency response and to improve major hazard awareness. Starting from a systemic view of accident causation, this paper illustrates by a simplified quantitative approach the determining role of organizational deficiencies in the safety procedures for handling abnormal situations and emergencies.