Critics often claim that transportation accident investigations focus on finding someone to blame at the expense of deeper inquiries into the organizational factors that may have contributed to the accidents. Our independent analysis of the results of major National Transportation Safety Board investigations into aviation, marine, rail, highway, pipeline, and hazardous materials accidents refut...

The environmental problems of the United States and the European nations have generated a dynamic body of literature in legal and economic research. One of the most significant branches of this research has been the analysis of strict liability versus ex post negligence standards, and the sharing of damages under each regime, when the level of prospective environmental damages can be estimated ...

This paper revisits work on the socio-political amplification of risk, which predicts that those living in developing countries are exposed to greater risk than residents of developed nations. This prediction contrasts with the neoliberal expectation that market driven improvements in working conditions within industrialising/developing nations will lead to global convergence of hazard exposure...

The recent expansion in the production of shale petroleum crude oil, combined with the lack of new pipeline construction, has placed the railroads at the center stage for safe and efficient transport of very large volumes of this commodity. Petroleum crude oil poses fire risk in the event of train accidents. The consequence modeling based on the US DOT Emergency Response Guidebook (ERG) or ALOH...

Residents living in communities near Superfund sites have expressed concern that releases from these facilities affect their health, including adverse effects on their immune systems. We used data from six cross-sectional studies to evaluate whether people who live near several Superfund sites are more likely to have individual immunoglobulin test results (IgA, IgG, and IgM) below or above the ...

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) uses chemical-specific minimal risk levels (MRLs) to assist in evaluating public health risks associated with exposure to hazardous substances. MRLs are estimates of daily human exposure to a chemical that are likely to be without an appreciable risk of adverse noncancer health effects over a specified duration of exposure. MRLs serve...

The recent US Commodity Flow Survey data suggest that transporting hazardous materials (HAZMAT) often involves multiple modes, especially for long-distance transportation. However, not much research has been conducted on HAZMAT location and routing on a multimodal transportation network. Most existing HAZMAT location and routing studies focus exclusively on single mode (either highways or railw...

Environmentalists worry that hazardous wastes produced in industrialized nations are being dumped in cash-starved developing countries--the countries with the least political or economic clout to resist and the fewest resources for managing these toxic imports. Imported waste can pose a serious threat to the health of human populations and ecosystems if not managed appropriately. In 1989, the i...