Two Tragedies

22-year-old with less than one years experience. The state mine safety inspector had allowed this deviation from the otherwise applicable certification and three-year experience requirements because the company had convinced the agency that the mine was not gassy despite the feet that a methane explosion had killed 54 miners in a nearby mine the previous week. 

After several families of victims sued Consolidation, the company s president asked its lead attorney whether it would not be cheaper and safer to keep a stiff upper lip and fight it out—than to do anything more than charity requires. Consolidation paid for the dead miners funeral expenses and provided compensation of 150 for each widow and 75 for every child of a dead miner under the age of 16. Since the state and federal courts of the era did not award compensation for accidents attributable to the negligence of the plaintiff or any of his fellow workers, that was essentially the end of the matter. The lawsuits were either dismissed or settled for small sums. Within two months, the mine was back in operation and the victims families were persona non grata in the company town.  

Energy subsidiary in Kentucky and four of its officials were convicted of knowingly violating MSHA ventilation regulations for four years and for lying to federal investigators about the practice.  

The Monongah disaster came at the end of a thirty-year period of American history in which the nation experimented with a radically noninterventionist approach to the relationship between government and a relatively new economic entity called the private corporation. During this period, which Mark Twain aptly labeled the Gilded Age, corporations were free to pursue their 

The evolving social bargain represents a continuing adjustment and readjustment of business and social institutions to three compelling but competing 

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In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it —Oscar Wilde, writer... 

The blowdown valves on the boilers were operated by a special key, which had a lug on it so that it could not be removed when the valve was open. It was therefore impossible, in theory, for two blowdown valves to be open at the same time. However, the boiler fitter kept and jealously guarded a private key w ithout a lug and had used this one to open the blowdown valve on the boiler that was under repair. He forgot to tell the process foreman what he had done or to close the valve. The presence of this key would appear to have been of little moment as long as the correct procedure of complete isolation was maintained, but as soon as it was departed from, the additional key became a menace, which eventually enabled the present tragedy to occur, the accident report said. 

An initial explosion occurred on the production deck of the Piper Alpha Offshore Platform in the North Sea at about 1 00 PM on July 6,1988. The incident escalated into a tragedy that cost the lives of 165 of the 225 persons on the platform. Two additional fatalities occurred on a rescue boat. The Piper Alpha Platform was totally devastated. 

In 1847 Joule married Amelia Grimes, and they had two children who suiwived them. Another son was horn on June 8, 1854, hut died later that month. This was followed by an even greater tragedy— within a few months Joule s wife also passed away. Joule never remarried, but spent the rest of his life with his two children in a variety of residences near Manchester. 

Recognizing that the chemical industry is safe, why is there so much concern about chemical plant safety The concern has to do with the industry s potential for many deaths, as, for example, in the Bhopal, India, tragedy. Accident statistics do not include information on the total number of deaths from a single incident. Accident statistics can be somewhat misleading in this respect. For example, consider two separate chemical plants. Both plants have a probability of explosion and complete devastation once every 1000 years. The first plant employs a single operator. When the plant explodes, the operator is the sole fatality. The second plant employs 10 operators. When this plant explodes all 10 operators succumb. In both cases the FAR and OSHA incidence rate are the same the second accident kills more people, but there are a correspondingly larger number of exposed hours. In both cases the risk taken by an individual operator is the same.4... 

By early 2003, however, the FDA had received 16,000 reports of "adverse events" apparently related to use of the product. Among these events were two deaths, four heart attacks, nine strokes, one seizure, and five psychiatric events for which no explanation other than use of the product could be found. Although ephedra accounts for less than 1 percent of all sales of dietary supplements, it accounts for 64 percent of all adverse events reported to the FDA. The agency s decision to take action against ephedra may have been influenced by the death of 23-year-old Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler on February 19, 2003, a tragedy attributed to the baseball player s use of ephedra. 

Two comments are warranted conceming4-MA, one of scientific interest, and the other about a social tragedy. 

In 1980, President Carter pushed hard for the CERCLA to be passed — mainly in response to various environmental tragedies in the news, such as the Love Canal toxic waste site near Niagara Falls and the valley of drums in Kentucky. People wanted someone to be held accountable for the toxic waste sites that littered the country. The CERCLA focuses on two issues responding to existing uncontrolled hazardous waste sites and preventing... 

Prior to the mid-1980s the chemical industry experienced some upheavals of which the thalidomide tragedy of the early 1960s and the Bhopal catastrophe in 1984 are two major examples. However, the lessons learned from such sad events led to a spectacular improvement during the 1990s in the safety record of the industry in the Western world. 

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