Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Apart from cynical assessments, in this case ethically condemnable, assumed as
a result of simple cost-bene
t analysis, this peculiar approach to hazards was
characterized, also in the transport sector, by a gradual process of privatization and
deregulation. In the railways and public transportation services this led some
advantages in terms of better competition and cost of services but it had also some
negative consequences, including a signi
cant reduction, as a consequence of the
need to reduce the operating costs, of some safety standards. An equal process of
deterioration of safety standards for the lack of control caused by organizational
weaknesses, but above all for the economic crisis even occurred, from the end of the
1980s, in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet
Union. In fact, it was here that there have been two of the major accidents ever
registered in the history of rail and subway lines: the disaster of Ufa in 1989, when a
gas pipeline exploded at the passage of two trains (at least 600 victims), and the
disaster of Baku, in Azerbaijan, in 1995, when a metro train caught
re and 337
people die.
Fire accidents in major tunnels, in the railway sector and in the transport sector
in general, represent another type of technological disaster. Particularly signi
cant
were the Channel tunnel
re of 1996 and the Gotthard incident
of 1997, that severely damaged equipment and tunnel infrastructures. But the most
serious accidents can probably be considered those that occurred in 1999 in the
Mont Blanc tunnel (39 victims) and in the Tauern tunnel in Austria (12 victims). In
both cases, among the main causes of the disaster there were accidents caused by
heavy vehicles. Another dramatic disaster was the
re and the Ekeberg
re that occurred in an ascending
railway car in a tunnel in Kaprun, Austria, on November 2000 (155 victims). After
these incidents national governments and European Union institutions have inter-
vened to prevent the recurrence of similar catastrophic events that receive enormous
media attention and consequently have a dramatic impact on the public.
Among the most serious technological accidents in transportations there are the
so called Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions (BLEVE): among them the
Los Alfaques Disaster occurred in 1978 near Tarragona, in Spain when a road
accident generated the explosion of a tanker truck (217 victims) and the isobutane
and propane explosions from a train derailment registered at Murdock, Illinois in
1983. This kind of disaster are very frequent in railway transportation: in 1997, in
Germany a regional passenger train collided with a freight train that carried petrol
tankers causing an explosion. Another serious accident caused by the explosion of
ammable substances carried by rail was to Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Canada, 1999.
Always a BLEVE,
nally, was the cause of the disaster happened in the railway
station of Viareggio (near Lucca, Italy) on July 2009. In that case, the derailment of a
freight train determined the rupture of a tank of gas that caused several explosion and
a
re that killed 30 people. The seriousness of these incidents lies not only in the
particular dangers of the substances but also in the possibility to occur the so-called
domino effect, much feared event by those involved in technological and industrial
disasters multiplying material damages but most of all the number of victims.
The most dramatic BLEVE disasters cases involved industrial plants. Some of
them have been particularly severe: the explosion at the re
nery in Feyzin, not far
