Technological Institute of the Philippines

1338 Arlegui St. Quiapo, Manila

HOMEWORK
Disaster Prevention Management
IE002 – Safety Management

Submitted by:
Mauricio, Krizzia Anne C.
CHE – 4 / 1512115

Submitted to:
Engr. Roberto dela Cruz

February 13, 2016

Public Health Management of Chemical Incidents
The prevention and mitigation of chemical incidents and their health consequences is a broad field
requiring specialists from many backgrounds. Public health has an essential role to play in preventing the
occurrence of chemical incidents, and minimizing their negative impacts on both the exposed population and
the environment should they occur. The purpose of this management is to introduce principles and
recommendations about the public health role in prevention and mitigation of chemical incidents will help
facilitate the effective fulfilment of such public health involvement, including by establishing or refining the
public health role in the development of a preparedness plan for management of chemical incidents and to
enhance capacity planning and assessment for chemical incidents. This document can also be used as an
aid to improve the performance of all professionals with responsibility for managing risks posed by chemical
incidents.

Injury mechanisms
Chemical incidents can cause injury through four basic injury mechanisms: fire, explosion, toxicity and the
experience of traumatic events. These injury mechanisms may appear to be quite distinct, but in reality are
strongly interrelated. •
 Fire produces injuries through heat and exposure to toxic substances (including combustion
products). A secondary effect of a fire may be an explosion or tank failure due to heating of tanks
holding chemicals. Every major fire can be considered a chemical incident. •
 An explosion produces traumatic (mechanical) injuries through the resulting shockwave (blast),
fragments and projectiles. As a secondary effect an explosion may result in a fire or loss of
containment resulting in release of and exposure to toxic chemicals (e.g. through penetration of an
adjacent tank by fragments: so-called domino effects). •
 Toxicity may result when humans come into contact with a chemical released from its containment,
be it from storage or transport, or as reaction or combustion products. Toxicity can cause harm by
a wide array of toxic mechanisms ranging from chemical burns to asphyxiation and neurotoxicity.
 Mental health effects, the final type of “injury” are not only determined by exposure to the chemical,
fire or explosion but also by “exposure to the event” itself. Severe incidents have the potential to
disrupt the lives of victims through injury, loss of relatives, property or employment and societal
disruption. A substantial proportion of victims of major incidents have been shown to experience
long-lasting mental health problems.
The disaster management cycle

The “disaster management cycle” illustrates the continuous process by which governments,
businesses and civil society plan for and reduce the impact of incidents by acting at different stages of an
incident’s life-cycle. The nature of activities that can be undertaken to reach the goal of impact reduction
varies with the stage of this cycle. The six stages of the disaster cycle will be introduced briefly (Figure 1).

The first line of defence against adverse consequences of chemical incidents is to prevent their
occurrence and to limit their impact if they do occur. Prevention is aimed at reducing the likelihood of an
incident occurring and includes all technical and organizational measures taken to reduce the severity of any
incident that might occur and to ensure that its impact is reduced to a minimum and that it does not become
a major event or disaster.
Despite the best efforts to eliminate risks and reduce the likelihood of their occurrence, some residual
risk will remain which can materialize in an incident. This residual risk should form the basis for subsequent
planning and preparedness. The time taken during an incident to locate equipment and infrastructure,
coordinate the actions of the various stakeholders, establish links between agencies and emergency
services, establish a response plan and gather general information about the pollutant(s) and the facility
responsible for the incident will be time lost towards minimizing the extent and consequences of a chemical
incident. Hence, these tasks should be accomplished prior to the incident, in order to ensure that immediate
efforts can readily be focused on the response to the incident. Therefore the incident response system should
be designed, the roles, responsibilities and competencies attributed, personnel selected, trained and
exercised, in the planning and preparedness stage.
Incident detection and alert is a continuous activity undertaken to pick up signals that a chemical
incident has occurred, and to ensure rapid alert for an appropriate and timely response.
When an incident takes place, the operator, authorities and the public initiate the incident response to
terminate the incident and mitigate the consequences.
After the incident has been terminated the recovery may take years of clean-up, health monitoring,
evaluation and other activities that are aimed at restoring the situation to how it was before the incident and
contributing to prevention of recurrence
 Figure 1. Stages of Disaster Management cycle

An example might explain the different stages of the disaster cycle.

When considering the prevention and mitigation of incidents arising from a large ammonia filled
cooling installation close to a residential area, the following activities fit to each of the stages of the disaster
management cycle:
 A preventive approach could be to replace the ammonia with a less toxic and flammable chemical,
reduce the amount of stored ammonia, build in redundancy of technical safety (partition the
ammonia into smaller vessels, strengthen the vessels and pipes) and/or relocate the facility to
somewhere where a release would not harm the public and the environment or create a distance
between the installation and nearby residents.

 Preparation would include development of release scenarios and planning the possible best
response, providing information and training for the public, installation of a public warning system,
training and equipping responders to deal with loss of containment.

 Detection and alert would include installation of gas detection systems (from operator controls to
fence-line monitoring), development of an effective system for alert and scaling up the incident
response and actually using these to monitor for a release.
 Response would be the termination and mitigation of an actual loss of containment and its health
consequences.

 Recovery includes activities such as health assessment, clean-up and investigation of the root
cause to prevent recurrence. The remainder of this manual is structured to follow the stages of the
disaster management cycle.