Disaster Database

EM-DAT is an international disaster database run by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). This Emergency Events Database provides data on the location, size and impact of different types of disaster from 1900 to the present (about 18,000 disasters in total and counting). For educational and investigative purposes a useful feature is the ability to create your own dataset based on your own criteria. You can select regions or countries, specific time periods and specific types of hazards to develop your customized set of data. An interest aspect of the database is that ‘technological’ hazards are included as well as ‘natural’ hazards, so an impression of different types of hazard can be built up. Hazards are divided or defined hierarchically by disaster generic group (natural or technological), subgroup, main type, then sub-type and a sub-sub type! It is not as complicated as it sounds! The impact of each hazard is defined in terms of number of people killed and injured, the number of people made homeless and those requiring immediate assistance after the disaster event as well as the estimated damage caused by the disaster event.
There are also a number of pre-prepared maps and graphs of the location of disasters on a global scale and of trends in disasters. The map below shows flood disasters between 1974 and 2003, which the graph illustrates the trend in the number of technological hazards since 1900. This database could be a very useful tool for exploring trends and patterns of disasters through time at difference scales. The reasons for these trends may require some thinking – increased reporting of disasters, increasing population growth and spread of population into hazardous areas, increasing growth of vulnerable populations to name but a few. Without the initial data through even identifying these patterns to explain would be difficult.

Flood disasters 1974-2003

Trend of numerb of technological disasters since 1900

Media and Hazards: Orphaned Disasters

An interesting blog published in 2010, Orphaned Disasters: On Utilising the Media to Understand the Social and Physical Impact of Disasters’ poseted by KJ Garbutt, looks at how the media views, priorities and ignores disasters producing what the author calls ‘orphaned disasters’. It has some interesting points to make. The blog has a link to Masters research undertaken at the University of Durham on which the blog is based.

CORRECTION: BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative?

CORRECTION: CORRECTION: CORRECTION

I have only just noticed that because of some sloppy cutting and pasting the original blog on BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative? must have lost sense to the reader about halfway through (anything before that was really written like that!) Sorry about this but it is a lesson to me to read blogs through properly again and again even when you think you have already done so.

The new, edited blog is now available. The original incorrect blog has been deleted.

BP Oil Spill: Disaters and Swiss cheese

Source: Charlie Riedel: Associated Press

The explosion on April 20th 2010 and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a major environmental disaster. Numbers can be trotted out to place it in context but the perception and reality is that this is a catastrophe for everyone; for the Gulf, for the environment, for jobs along the Gulf coast and beyond, for the US government and for BP. There are technical questions about how it occurred and serious concerns about the clean up but there are other more generic issues about risks and hazards that this major environmental disaster highlights.

The catalogue of BP ‘errors’ in procedure have been chronicled in the open in front of a congressional panel. BP are said to have cut corners in well design, cementing and drilling mud and installation of safety devices – lockdown sleeves and centralizers. The choices BP made produced a route to disaster that, although not a perfect fit match, the ‘Swiss cheese’ model. The Swiss cheese model was developed by James Reason in 2000 and is based on the idea that in any complex system the route to a disaster is prevented by a series of barriers. These barriers can be procedures, safety equipment, morals, anything that will restrict or constrain the actions of both the people involved and the natural phenomenon involved in the complex system. Reason viewed the system and randomness as being essential in a hazard being realised. With some modifications the same type of model can be applied to the oil spill and BPs catalogue of errors.

Reason's Swiss cheese mdoel of disaters

The layers of the ‘Swiss cheese’ are the barriers that are meant to prevent the disaster that unfolded, each slice is anything that prevents the trajectory of a disaster so that could be procedure, person, technical specification designed to prevent a blow out. The holes in the layers are the weak spots, the holes or gaps that allow ‘mistakes’ to be made. Individually, these mistakes may not be an issue. If the other holes aren’t in lien then the next barrier prevents the trajectory of disaster. Collectively, when all the holes are aligned, disasters occur. The layers can be thick or thin, heavy or light regulation of an industry for example, and likewise the holes can be large or small, gapping omissions from safety protocols or tiny, repetitive practices that for years haven’t been an issue because the other holes haven’t been in alignment.

The list of BP ‘errors’ or holes in each layer meant to prevent a trajectory to disaster is long and seems to be ever expanding. Depending on which reports you read the mistakes those in the table below (derived from tampby.com and businessinsider.com).

• Well design and maintenance:
  April 14th-15th: BP granted permit changes to speed up its over-budget drilling operation in Deepwater Horizon in addition to its existing ‘categorical exclusion’ from 2009. BP allowed to install cheaper, smaller single pipe. Double-lined pipe would offer protection from escaping gas.
  Gaps in pipe segment could have released a blast of gas to the surface
  Lack of O-ring seal could have let a blast of gas up the pipe
  Drilling chief noticed ballooning of the well walls


• Contaminated cement in capping operation (possibly):
  April 20th : Contractors Halliburton trying to temporarily plug and cap well. Technicians noticed pressure rise that suggested cement not holding. One test showed a ‘very large abnormality’, another test was misread and well declared safe.


• Alleged BP ‘company man’ over-rule:Despite rising pressure process of replacing drilling mud with seawater began, a standard practice if no pressure problems. The objections of workers were over-ruled by BP ‘company man’. Rise in pressure resulted from oil and gas rising in well.


• Hesitation in safety procedures?:
  Technicians waited for official approval from BP before turning on blowout preventer. There was no hydraulic pressure when it was switched on. There is debate whether this equipment would have worked anyway in a deepwater well.
  No evacuation of rig ordered despite abnormal test results.


• Weak initial reconnaissance:
  April 22nd – Remote robot sent to well head – no leak detected


• No sonic testing:
  BP had no plans to conduct a cement bond log test which uses sonics to identify any weaknesses in cement – source calls it a gold standard test.


• Fake testing?:An employee has indicated he saw evidence of test results on blowout preventer being faked.


• BP response plan: Aside from the obvious of having a dead man as one of your specialsit, BP only had a generic response plan for the Gulf of Mexico not a specific plan for Deepwater (granted exemption). Delays in getting to survivors of the explosion and the generic plan having a worse case scenario of only 20,000 bbl are just two examples of problems with the generic plan.


• Research delays:
  BP spent weeks after the explosion researching how to stop the leak. No research in place on how to stop leak at this depth.

So what does this evolving list of errors actually tell us?


If you divide the items above into pre-event, event (simplistically mapped out below) and post-event and apply this to the Swiss cheese model, then it is clear that there were systemic holes in BP’s supposed barriers to such a disaster before the first well was even drilled. On the day of the explosion, further holes emerged in barriers, the safety procedures, that were meant to be in place and finally after the explosion the generic nature of the response plan was exposed as inadequate, more holes appeared as events unfolded. This is just one set of ‘mistakes’, other Swiss cheese figures could be constructed to illustrate others and added to as more information becomes available about the disaster.




PRE-EVENT



EVENT

What the Swiss cheese model can’t tell you is why the holes appeared in the layers and why layers thinned. Greed has been put forward as a motive by newspapers, Gulf residents and politicians. Other oil companies have testified to Congress that they would not have made the same key decisions as BP. So is it that simple? A greedy company cut corners to keep costs low and endanger the environment? Although there may prove to be an large dose of truth as the lax protocols and potential company over-ruling of workers is assessed in this another set of questions also need to be asked. Why was BP allowed the exemptions and exclusions? Why were protocols not followed? Why was testing not carried out? These seem to be some of the obvious questions and ones specific to this incident.


It may be as useful to look at the context of the drilling as much as the detail. BP were undertaking deepwater drilling, a relatively new venture for oil companies. How much of the protocols and systemic behaviour was based on BP’s experience on shallow drilling and the latitude in safety measures and well maintenance that that experience implied? If BP’s past experience was the basis for their practices in the Gulf of Mexico then it would appear that the past, the different drilling context, may not be a useful guide to the dangers of the present novel drilling operations. In other words, in this new context is knowing the way the system operated in the past, where the holes in the layers were, how thick the layers were, sufficient to ensure that drilling is safe. How have other oil companies translated and interpreted, improved safety protocols, well designs and a myriad of other parameters to take account of the new dirlling context? Often without a disastrous event, the assumptions of operating in a new context are not questions. Maybe BP’s legacy will be a review by all, compmaies, government adminsitrations and safety officials of the new holes in the cheese in this new context.

James Reason has publsihed a book on accidents taht develops this type of model.

Environmental Geography - why?

This blog will, I hope, help people to understand what Environmental geography is and why it is an important way of looking at the world.

I am a Principal Lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth and in 2009 I, with my colleagues, started an undergraduate degree course in BSc and BA in Environmental Geography. Three of us, myself, Brian Baily and Julia Brown, researched the market and felt that what we believed to be the important aspects of environmental geography were not being taught in other courses of the same name (or if they were it wasn’t immediately clear from course outlines). We feel that environmental geography should encompass both physical and human geography and act as a means of integrating and melding the two substantive fields of traditional geography. I could go on about how environmental geography provides an interface, a means of bridging the arts and sciences, but really this view of geography has been a key focus of the geography since it developed as a university level subject back in the 1887 with Halford Mackinder at Oxford (date of his ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ paper delivered at the Royal Geographical Society, RGS. He was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford within six months of this paper).

Aside from the academic pursuit of the subject, we feel that taking an informed ‘environmental’ perspective on the various issues and problems confronting people on a global and local basis can help in understanding the context of these problems, how they are themselves constructed and, dare we believe, even provide possible solutions to these issues. The last suggestion may be a forlorn hope but at least if you appreciate why an issue is so complex it may help in trying to understand how different interests have such difficulty trying to solve a problem. All three of us have a particular view or stance on environmental issues; we are not politically neutral and would be wary of any one who claims otherwise. This does not mean, however, that we do not try to comprehend why others approach, understand or even identify environmental issues differently from ourselves – this is all part of environmental geography.

We feel that it is important to understand both the physical and human processes that underlie environmental geography, that drive environmental change and stability but it is not enough just to understand each part in isolation. The two must be brought together and the difficulties and complexities of that assimilation of different knowledges recognised. Above all understanding the environment is as much about politics as it is about science – a key element we felt was not explicitly developed or at the forefront in the course outlines we saw. You can collect all the data about climate change that you want, you can validate the science but if no-one acts upon it then ‘scientific objectivity’ means very little. Understanding how different systems of knowledge merge and interact is a key feature of understanding the production of environmental geography.

The blog will cover a whole range of topics and I hope to upload new content on a fairly regular basis – once a week at least – or two if work interferes! I will divide the blog, initially at least, into History of Environmental Thought, Monitoring the Environment, Environmental Hazards, Environment and Society, Environmental News. I do not, however want to be too rigid in how the blog develops – feedback is welcome and essential for me to gauge if there is anyone out there reading this and, if so, what really interests them.

This blog will, I hope, build up into a useful resource for students undertaking geography GCSE, A level and undergraduates as well as informing anyone who is interested in environmental issues in general. The geographic perspective may provide something new to your thinking or it may not, but at least I hope it is useful.

Environmental Disasters

We remember disasters. Pictures stream across our television screen, graphic images of the misery of death and the chaos of destruction. Hundreds, even thousands of people die, their agony captured and rerun in digital formats across the Web. Scientists tell us what happened and why, politicians bemoan the lack of warning and the poor die. Boxing Day 2004, Katrina 2005, Haiti 2010 – just dates and places but there is an immediate recognition of what they refer to.

How can we study these events and, importantly how can we understand and prevent them? This is a set of questions that has long been a staple part of academic study and it has a distinctly geographical dimension. There are three main approaches to trying to understand hazards and disasters: the dominant, the developmental and the complex. They could be seen chronologically, with the last being more sophisticated than the first or they could just be seen as different ways of looking at the same thing. A key thing to bear in mind is that there is usually a distinction between a hazard and a disaster. A hazard is the potential or possibility for damage or harm; the vulnerability for a loss. Disaster in contrast is the realisation of that potential.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 were destructive by any measure you care to use. Death tolls of over 200,000 almost outstrip comprehension. Whole cities levelled, communities ripped apart, national economics shattered. How could we study such events? The dominant approach (or behavioural paradigm according to Smith and Petley, 2009) takes what many would call as a very rational, scientific view of a disaster. A disaster is the result of an extreme geophysical event. The geophysical causes the problem and it is often seen as a matter of luck or not if people are harmed. Studying how people behave before and during a disaster, understanding their rational decision making and where they are irrational is the basis for developing management tools for organising populations. Civil authorities tend to view such events as distinct and discrete breaks with normality; times of crisis for which special plans, actions and laws (or lack of liberties) are needed.

In addition, understanding detailed scientific analysis of the geophysical processes that produce extreme geophysical events provides the information for attempting to predict the location and timing of such events. Of course such detailed study requires extensive and often expensive monitoring systems as well as well integrated early warning systems and a civil authority able to rationally plan for what to do with a population once the sirens sound. Such an approach could be called a ‘technological fix’ approach to disasters. Leave it to the experts and everyone might be saved.

How does this view play out in reality? Let’s take FEMA’s webpages on the National Earthqauke Reduction Programme (NEHRP) as an example (www.fema.gov/plan/prevent/earthquake/nehrp.shtm or www.nerhp.gov for the NEHRP webpages). The opening statement highlights the dominance of the dominant view of disasters.

‘The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) seeks to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States through both basic and directed research and implementation activities in the fields of earthquake science and engineering.’
Reading the Strategic Plan for the National Earthquakes Hazards Reduction Programme (Fiscal Years 2009-2013) (http://www.nehrp.gov/pdf/strategic_plan_2008.pdf) there are three key goals –

A: Improve understanding of earthquake processes and impacts;
B: Develop cost-effective measures to reduce earthquake impacts on individuals, the built environment, and society-at-large;
C: Improve the earthquake resilience of communities nationwide.

Within these goals there are a number of objectives but each can be seen to be using language associated with the dominant paradigm. For goal A, for example, objective 1 is ‘advance understanding of earthquake phenomena and generation processes’, basically do fundamental science into the geophysical phenomenon. Even when people and society are considered as in objective 3, it is viewing actions as being amendable to study using similar rational methods as those used for the geophysical phenomenon. Likewise for goal B, the objectives talk about developing tools for assessing loss and risk, implying that everything can be allocated a number, a quantity for comparison. Even goal C is couched in these terms. Objectives 11 and 12, for example, seek to promote or support the implementation of public and private standards in building codes and policies, whilst objective 10 focuses on developing more comprehensive risk scenarios for planning actions, presumably at an appropriate organisational level.

Seeing disasters as driven by the geophysical event, as crisis that need crisis management responses and as understandable via scientific analysis and usually via quantification of impacts is not necessarily wrong. It is vital to know what the geophysical event is and how it varies. It is vital to understand how buildings behave in earthquakes and build accordingly. But are people simply rational entities that will be told what to do by authorities? Is it simply a case of knowing more and telling everyone – will this reduce disasters?

In my next blog will explain how people’s behaviour has been studied and how rational decision making is incorporated into this dominant paradigm.