Achemical incident is the unexpected release of industrial material that is (potentially) hazardous either to humans, other animals or the environment. Common synonyms include the term “accident” but this presupposes an anticipated failure of control; “incidents” include also unanticipated disasters resulting from mechanical or organisational failures, and occasionally even sabotage. The essenc...

It is now generally recognized that in order to make significant advances in accident prevention, the focus of industrial firms must shift from assessing the risks of existing production and manufacturing systems to discovering technological alternatives, i.e. from the identification of problems to the identification of solutions. Encouraging the industrial firm to perform (1) an inherent safet...

The reflections regarding risk and industrial catastrophes question the complexity theories. Besides the new concepts which lead us to question older concepts (risk, hazard and vulnerability), we propose to think about more practical aspects, for example the modelling of human behaviour and the confrontation in crisis situations. The link between concepts as: critical self-organization, emergen...

This paper presents our framework based on visual exploration of disaster areas (i.e. after an earthquake, a tsunami or an industrial accident). It is meant to help rescue teams to locate hotspots (i.e. half-buried person or broken and dangerous canalization) and to maintain an Internet connection for them. Indeed, our solution uses several small autonomous drones (or UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehi...

Orbital emphysema can be produced by trans-conjunctival migration of air from a high pressure airgun. In an industrial accident an 8 mm conjunctival laceration was produced in the superior fornix which acted as a portal of entry for air into the subconjunctival, subcutaneous, and retrobulbar spaces. Computed tomography revealed no evidence of orbital fracture and showed that traumatic orbital e...

From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development of industrial writing. Although prevented from gaining first-hand experience of the coalface, Welsh women writers were amongst the first to try to fictionalize those heavy industries-coal and metal in the south, and slate in the north-which dominated the lives of the majority of the late nineteenth-...

Although a "system approach" to accidents in sociotechnical systems has been frequently advocated, formal system theoretic concepts remain absent in the literature on accident analysis and system safety. To address this gap, we introduce the notions of coordinability and consistency from the hierarchical and multilevel systems theory literature. We then investigate the applicability and the imp...