Tianjin China Explosion Essay: Disaster Analysis Report (70 Characters)

• Identify and analyse risk (financial, legal, environmental, HR);

• Create a plan for measuring and monitoring performance;

• Describe the process used to analyse strategic issues;

The assessment focus is on risk management, risk assessment and risk mitigation plans.

In this assessment, you will complete a disaster analysis report using the principles of risk management. The focus of the disaster analysis will be the Tianjin China explosion of 13 August 2015: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-chin a-33896292 

Then Write a case based risk analysis report incorporating all sections of business such as risk management, risk assessment and risk mitigation plans, including the necessary communication plans to ensure that incidents and risk are managed safely and in a controlled manner.

Ensure to incorporate the following elements: 

• Critically examine key issues which have a significant impact on risks associated with engineering activities including safety and environmental management systems.

• Effectively employ identification and risk management tools to propose and analyse realistic risk scenarios and develop risk management strategies.

• Critically analyse the usefulness, applicability and limitations of risk assessment as a decision-making tool.

• Critically analyse risk erce tion and risk communication and effectively develop risk communication plans an skills.

Risks involving safety and environmental aspects

The primary purpose of this report is to analyse the risks after the major accident occurred in China in 2015. This report will be focussing on the key issues related to the accident and its significant impact on a global basis. All the risks associated with the engineering activities including the safety and environmental aspects are given prime importance in this document. The risk management tools used for proposing and analysing the risk scenarios are discussed in this paper along with the different risk management techniques. Critical analysis of the risk management tools is described in details in this paper (Alderson, Brown & Carlyle, 2015). Critical analysis of the risk perception and risk communication plan are conducted so that future accidents can be minimized to a significant extent.

The series of explosion rocked the port of Tianjin in China, a huge amount of harmful material such as sodium cyanide and ammonium nitrate were released from the accident sites (Chiu & Choi, 2016). Even after 3 days of the first blast, situation got worse after more explosion during the recovery stages, almost 180 people working in the corporation lost their lives and the Chinese government imposed a ban on all the social media activities in order to stop people from spread fake information about the situation and create more panic on a global basis (De Boer et al., 2014).

This unit of the document will be focussing on the different types of issues which have a significant impact on the accident occurred in China in 2015. A series of explosions occurred in the at a container storage station at the port of Tianjin (Anderson et al., 2014). There were two explosions at the site and it has numerous environmental and safety issues related with which will be described in details. There are different type’s activities involved in a container storage station such as the risks associated with the use of toxic chemicals, risks involved in maintaining the temperature and pressure, risks associated with the harmful chemicals and radiations which cause several types of health hazards such as irritations and skins diseases (Cimini et al., 2015). The risks involved in this type of accident which occurred in Tianjin China such as the risk of explosion of uncontrolled chemicals due to lack of awareness, cuts and pricks caused by the sharp objects, exposure to hazardous chemicals, different types of human errors such as electric shocks, teratogenic and carcinogenic substances are an important parameter which should be given greater importance so that similar future accidents are minimized.

Lack of performance measures

Regarding the safety and environmental aspect of this explosion, it can be understood that these risks can have a major impact on a human body by affecting specific human organs such as skin, lung and liver (Ayyub, 2014). It can also have a direct impact on the nervous systems and reproductive systems of a human body, these factors should be highly considered while the production is underway in a container storage station in order to avoid such accidents in the future (Aven, 2015). Maintenance of the flammable substances is the most crucial part of this major accident. The environmental health hazard regarding this accident is also considered in this document (Jacobsson, Boldt & Carlsson, 2016).

Impact 1: Lowest risk

Impact 2: Lower risk

Impact 3: Low risk

Impact 4: Moderate risk

Impact 5: Moderately high risk

Impact 6: High risk

Impact 7: Highest risk

Risks on Human beings, risk on the society and the risk involving the understanding of the harmful chemicals are maximum risks which need to be reduced on an urgent basis.

These types of risk mitigation plan which are needed to be adapted by the storage container company in order to manage the risks associated the with this accident (Du et al., 2015). There are different types of risks associated with that huge accident and it should be solved according to the priority as discussed below:

This huge accident which involved a series of explosions over a span of 3-4 days in one of the most important business ports in China had different types of the uncertainty of risks (Goerlandt & Kujala, 2014). The judgement of the risk accessors is really important for the decision-making methods in this famous accident. These different types of useful techniques will be helping to minimize all the problems related to the accident (Gardoni & Murphy, 2014). There are different kinds of uncertainty regulations in storage container company  in Tianjin, China which are  needed to be  of identified and managed as these issues negatively impact the business operations for many weeks to come (Kou, Peng & Wang, 2014). Identifications of the possible threats of the storage container company in Tianjin, China are one of the most important uses of the decision-making methods as it provides a great help in the approximation of the likelihood that those threats will materialize. The other advantage of the risk analysis of the storage container company in Tianjin, China is the estimation of the reasons and consequences of the accident as well as the security protocols involved in the accident. The importance of this analysis of this major accident also involves accurate plans regarding making forecasts about any issue, the power of anticipation increases due to it. This analysis is required to understand whether the steps followed in mitigating the risks are working properly or not. The existing risk management techniques of the container company in Tianjin should be improved with the help of the risk analysis, all the flaws associated with the analysis can be acknowledged and modified with the practice of risk analysis. All the new terms and conditions set by the different nongovernmental organisation as well as the instructions provided by the government can be followed by using the risk analysis methods.

Management

There are different types of limitations associated with the accident which occurred in China 2015 where the government of China and later the military service of China conducted a detailed risk analysis and concluded that they understood the risk and along with that they provided effective risk mitigation steps which are required to overcome the situation but following these are also not easy as different types of limitations are attached with this. Collectively they achieved best-informed estimations of a likelihood of various events taking place. The impacted area was seized by the government of China months after the explosion so one of the prime limitations of the risk analysis is the lack of actual valid data from the sites as there are many areas where the analysis ere developed by assumptions. The insufficient experience of the risk analysis team is also a matter of concern and is an important limitation regarding the risk analysis. The different type of environmental factors of the Tianjin disaster is also considered as a limitation regarding this accident (Ayyub, 2014). The information gaps between the members of the risk analysis team of this storage company can the other limitation of the risk analysis.

There are different types of safety case regulations involving the major disaster which occurred in China, it has both positive and negative applications (Hyun et al., 2015). Primary perquisites are performance standards required to set specific performances of those arrangements and enabling the continued efficacy in practice to get monitored (Li et al., 2015). The fire and safety regulation developed by the government of China help in a great way to implement the strategies of the training. All of these risk mitigation steps are considered on the basis of all the engineering activities of the storage container station in Tianjin, China. It helped in the enhancement of the inherent security and denote safety systems (Ayre et al., 2014). The other important applications include the ability to perform the risk mitigation steps needed due to an explosion and fire analysis.

The different types of risks associated with a major blast in the Tianjin China in 2015 are discussed in this section of the paper. It will help the reader to under more about the accident also understand its characteristics and severity. The illegal storage of thousands of tones of hazardous chemicals are the prime reasons behind this major accident. The emergency mitigation teams were unaware of those harmful chemicals, as a result, the water which is used by them in the industry helped the fire to spread more instead of containing the fire which worsened the situation (Bolger & Rowe, 2015). The water mixed with those harmful chemicals and released toxic compounds in the air and water system of the surrounding areas of the factory. Among the dead people, there was around 104 firefighter who died due to the lack of proper knowledge, this issue could have been avoided bit negligence among the authorities of both the container storage company and the firefighting departments cost them their lives (Ashofteh, Haddad & Marino, 2014).

Operational Plan

The risk communication plan regarding this famous explosion in China in 2015 involves all the workers working in the firm, there is an urgent need to educate them about the potential hazards of each of the toxic chemicals. Not only the worker all the people living in the surrounding areas must also be aware of the threats. One of the important tasks of the risk communication team is to validate their methods amongst all the parties (Arnold & Yildiz, 2015). Both the ecological risk management and human health risk management are managed by the communication plan.

The different steps of ecological risk communication plan considering the Tianjin disaster are:

• Characterisation of the possible risks
• Planning and Scoping
• Formulation of the problems
• Stress response and exposure analysis.

The different steps of the human health risk communication plan considering the Tianjin disaster are:

• Risk characterization.
• Planning and Scoping.
• Acute Hazards.
• Hazard identification and response.
• Exposure assessment.

The risk communication plan which is adopted by the Chinese authorities such as banning the media from telecasting any type of new related to the accident for the purpose of minimizing the spreading of fake news which can further damage the situation (Zhu et al., 2015). But instead of tackling the situation in that way the authorities of the storage container company should have stressed on the correct way of taking down the fire.

• The knowledge which was given to the workers or the firefighter was not enough to tackle the situations, in fact, the firefighter was misled which negatively impacted the situation rather than improving the situation. The communication plan of the container storage firm should be based on a science-based approach for maximum effectivity.
• The different view of risk mitigation strategy among all the different stakeholders of that container storage should have been the same as it would minimize the effect of the tragedy.
• The risk communication plan of the container storage corporation should be developed considering all the stakeholders of the storage company as well all the other people who are in the blast radius such as people living with 1-2 miles of the factory.
• The risk communication plan of the container storage station should be made on different languages as it will helpful for the workers who are not comfortable with the local language.
• Different kinds of communication tools such as social media should be encouraged for the promotion of the risk communication plans (Huq et al., 2016). Workers of the container storage station should be collectively agreeing on any decision making in the social media itself.

Hence it can be said that an effective risk communication plan is really helpful to regain the trust and confidence of the impacted peoples of that accident which diminished significantly after the tragedy.

Conclusion

From the above report, it can be concluded that effective risk management technique should have been taken by both the authorities of the storage container as well as the government authorities of China. This report presented a useful plan to measure and manage all the risks associated with this accident. The different types of risk analysing technique should be updated on a regular basis as the agent and means of the threat changes with time. The corporations should be taking all the possible necessary steps in order to deal with similar situations in a more efficient way. The quality of the risk analysing team of container storage station should also be updated after regular intervals so that it can deal with the most updated problems.

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