Industrial accidents

Industrial accidents caused in industries or workplace where engineering is necessary and the reason
behind these accidents was ignorance or bad choice of material or incompetence which resulted into
loss of life or injury, environmental degradation and also property damages. The world is suffering
from these kinds of several disasters. The role of engineer is to build any of creation by certain
specification and that creation should be best suitable to perform their role without any kinds of
failure. Every creation must fail after sought after time but engineer have to have knowledge about
that failure time and engineer must make design of creation like it will not fail for long time and more
specifically it is not meet with catastrophic failure. Still, the world suffers from such kind of
engineering disasters which was the proof of bad engineering. Engineers have ability to prevent
human beings from these happenings. This resource provides adequate information about different
industrial accidents, reasons behind them and what engineers learnt from these accidents.
Industrial accidents occurred in different sectors in past like chemical industries, defence industries,
mining sites, power industries and manufacturing industries. The reasons behind the accidents are
mostly same in same sector. In chemical industries, these accidents are the outcome of flammable
material explosions. Similarly, accidents took place in defence industries previously were the result of
explosions of high explosives. In mining sites, these misfortunes are due to constructions or due to
blasts of natural gases or coal. Other than that in nuclear industries, the cause of people died was
evacuation of radioactive material. These all failures are related to engineering field and causes
behind them are result of bad engineering.
Accidents happened in chemical industries were caused by engineering failure which is about 73%.
The research indicates that most of failure occurred was due to design of equipment and lack use of
latest technology, wrong use of equipment, confusing access system of equipment, incorrect operating
instructions and many more. It is important for technicians to learn for their mistakes and make sure
that this happening will never happen in future. The study shows that worldwide many research
carried out to identify reasons behind failure and from that other people learn and fix their errors.
Also, by this investigation industrial safety is improved at next stages. However, technical analysis of
the accidents is not proper; this is because of incomplete survey or investigation and also due to
inadequate information gathered from the research.

Accidents were happened because of several reasons like poor leadership of manufacturer, improper
supervision, unsystematic safety majors and safety system in industries, poor employee motivation
and training and poor analysis of system to eliminate these hazards. To overcome this situation it is

important for engineers and organization to work under safety majors and implement better industrial
safety program in organization. Industrial safety program that help industries to overcome the
situation of accidents or reduced it to minimum level. So, safety program deals from first step in
industry to reduce damage to persons or property. Safety program have to follow proper path to
succeed from such failure which include number of steps like find the root cause from previous
accidents, analyse that cause and identify that, also make sure about the safety major of employees in
working condition, continuously monitor the safety program and give proper training to employees at
interval of times about new safety guide and about new technology as well.
However, sometime these safety programs fail to provide suitable environment to employees because
of co-op of workers or employees in terms of safety guide. They neglect to follow the rules for safety
and it resulted into injury. Also, management take this safety standard laterally and do not give
importance as much as other departments and this negligence leads to failure. Additionally, it is
mandatory for organization or industry of having appropriate and sufficient safety measures, the
absence of these measures leads to failure. To avoid these issues company must encourage employees
by posters of safety or by sort films about safety, award of safety to employees, provide proper
training at interval of time and arrange weekly or monthly inspection of safety in working
environment of employees as well as machines, equipment or electrical connections.
SS Sultana, the passenger steamboat exploded in Mississippi River. In this incident about 1550 people
died which is categorised as United States worst disaster. The root cause of this incident was firstly
because of overcrowded boat and main reason behind this happening was use of in appropriate
repaired boiler which was resulted into explosion and explosion lead to other two boiler explosions.
Boiler was not properly repaired by technician because of time limit and order from the captain and
chief engineer of ship also approved this leak repaired boiler. The use of this boiler resulted into
explosion and as mostly steamer made of wood. So, it was easily fired and resulted in loss of 1550
lives. This disaster was nothing more than negligence and incompetence of maintenance work.
One other example of industrial disaster is Bhopal disaster. This disaster is one of the worst disasters
among all industrial disaster. The main reason behind this accident was leakage of poisonous gas
methyl isocyanate about 15 metric tons from Union carbide India limited. This gas spread in 30
square miles area and which resulted in instantly death of 4000 citizen and followed by health
related problem to 50000 to 500000 people. Among them around 15000 people died and more
than 100000 people suffer from diseases. The research committee of Bhopal disaster found the
root cause and the progress of this disaster. Firstly water was gone inside the MIC storage tanks
because of not having valves which stop water to enter into storage tanks. Once water was mixed
with methyl isocyanate and made poisonous gas which was release through open safety valves.
Normally scrubbers would stop these poisonous gas but those were not in operating condition.
Freon gas refrigeration system was installed in plant but industry stopped that cooling system to
save money and transfer that Freon to other plants. Lower level of safety in factory was the main
cause of this accident and it was because of lower budget. Here, the procedure of accident is
shown in figure: