Perspectives on Industrial Disaster Management

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. The human side of the banks credit management of small firms. 3. Management of banks loans to small firms in a market with Asymmetric information. 4. Prevention of disaster. 5. The man-machine interface and its impact on shipping safety. 6. Organisation and the management of safety risks in the chemical process industry. 7. The development of safety culture. 8. Culture, politics, learning and man-made disasters. 9. The schematic report analysis diagram (A simple aid to learning from large-scale failures). 10. Decision making under contradictory certainties (How to save the Himalayas?). 11. Organisations and systematic distortion of information. 12. Safety culture, corporate culture (Organisational transformation and the commitment to safety). 13. The failure of Hindsight. Index.

"The modern world is based on the achievements of the industrial revolution. Now the small scale industries which had emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have become large scale industries in which the large number of people work and there is great investment and infrastructure involved in these large scale industries. Mining is one of the major industries where possibilities of disasters are very frequent. Some years back there was great industrial disaster in Bhopal in India in which the Union carbide was involved. A gas leak has rendered the lives of thousands of people crippled and the civic authorities were quite ignorant about the remedial measures to be taken in such an eventuality. There was a great loss of life and money. The scars of Union Carbide in Bhopal are still fresh in the minds of the people." (jacket)