Technogenic accidents: concept, classification, examples. Causes of technogenic accidents and catastrophes. Personal safety in man-made accidents

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

At whatever stage of development human society is, it is always and inextricably linked with the environment. At the beginning of the 21st century, our civilization is increasingly feeling the changes on the planet, initiated by itself. The more dangerous human intervention in nature, the more unpredictable and terrible her answers become. However, the environment is far from always to blame: man-made accidents in 70% of cases occur through the fault of the person himself.

Every year the number of such events only grows, catastrophes of this nature happen, sadly, almost daily. Scientists testify that over the past 20 years their frequency has increased exactly twice. Unfortunately, behind all these figures lies a sad reality: man-made accidents are not only huge costs for eliminating their consequences, but also crippled lives and people who died or were left crippled.

Basic information

By the way, what exactly is meant byby this term? It's simple: fires, plane crashes, car accidents, other events that occurred through the fault of a person. The more our civilization relies on technical means of management, the more often man-made accidents occur. This, alas, is an axiom.

Formation stages

Every event in the world does not happen "anyhow" and not immediately. Even a volcanic eruption is preceded by a certain phase of accumulation of molten magma. So in this case: man-made disasters begin with an increase in the number of negative changes either in the industry or at a particular facility. Any catastrophe (even man-made) occurs under the influence of decentralizing, destructive factors on the existing system. Technologists distinguish five phases of emergency development:

• Primary accumulation of deviations.
• Initiation of a process (terror attack, technical failure, negligence).
• Directly an accident.
• The action of the consequences, which can be very long.
• Measures to eliminate the accident.

Since we are considering man-made accidents, we will analyze their main causes and predisposing factors:

• Saturation and excessive complexity of the production process.
• Initial design and manufacturing errors.
• Depreciated equipment, obsolete means of production.
• Mistakes or intentional harm from service personnel, terrorist attacks.
• Misunderstanding in the joint actions of various specialists.

Here are the main causes of industrial accidents. It must be said that even 100-150 years ago there were very few of their varieties: a shipwreck, an accident at a factory, etc. To date, the variety of production and technical means is such that a separate classification of man-made accidents was required. We will analyze it.

Traffic accidents

This is the name of some extreme event involving vehicles that arose as a result of technical malfunctions or external influences, as a result of which damage to property occurred, significant damage was caused, people were killed or injured. To better understand the scale of such events, here are a few examples:

• 1977, Los Rodeos Airport (Canary Islands). A terrible accident when two Boeing 747s collided at once. The disaster killed 583 people. To date, this is the largest and most terrible accident in the history of all civil aviation.
• 1985, Japanese Boeing 747 flight JAL 123 crashed into a mountain due to a navigation system error. The disaster claimed the lives of 520 people. To this day, it is considered the largest accident of a civilian aircraft.
• September 2001, USA. The infamous plane crash into the World Trade Center towers. The exact number of dead is still unknown.

Thus, the death of people is the worst thing that man-made accidents bring. There are examples of similar disasters in the USSR:

• November 16, 1967 when departing fromYekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk) crashed IL-18. All 130 people on board at the time were killed.
• On May 18, 1972, an An-10 crashed at the Kharkiv airport, breaking into pieces during landing. A total of 122 people died. Subsequently, it turned out that the cause of such an absurd disaster was the deep design flaws of the machine itself. More aircraft of this type were not operated.

And now let's talk about what man-made accidents and disasters can threaten everyone: after all, the chance of dying in a plane crash is extremely small, which cannot be said, for example, about fires.

Fires and explosions

This is one of the most widespread disasters of natural and man-made origin in the world, from ancient times to the present day. They cause enormous material damage, colossal harm to nature, a large number of people die. Survivors experience psychological stress, which they often cannot cope with on their own, as they need the help of a qualified psychologist.

When did such man-made accidents occur in the recent past? Examples from the recent past:

• June 3, 1989 - a terrible event in the history of our country: not far from the town of Asha, rolling stock of two passenger trains caught fire at once. Presumably, this happened due to a gas leak on the main gas pipeline. A total of 575 people died, including 181 children. The exact reasons for what happened are still not clear.
• 1999 Mont Blanc tunnel. The passenger car caught fire. The fire spread so much that it was possible to extinguish it only after two days. 39 people died. The companies operating the tunnel's maintenance were found guilty, as was the dead truck driver.

What other man-made accidents exist? Examples, unfortunately, are numerous.

Accidents with the release (or threat) of potent poisons

In this case, a large amount of substances are released into the environment, which, in their effect on living organisms, are equivalent to strong poisons. Many of these compounds not only have a high degree of toxicity, but are also very volatile, quickly escaping into the atmosphere when the production cycle is disrupted. Such man-made accidents and catastrophes are really terrible, since a lot of people die in their course, even more remain disabled, they give birth to children with terrifying genetic abnormalities and deformities.

One of the most horrific examples of this type of accident is one that happened at a subsidiary of the American company Union Carbide. Since then, the Indian city of Bhopal has rightfully been considered synonymous with hell on earth. There was a catastrophe in 1984: as a result of the incredibly stupid negligence of the attendants, thousands of tons of methyl isocyanate, the strongest poison, entered the atmosphere. All this happened late at night. By morning, whole apartments and streets were littered with corpses: the poison literally burned the lungs, and people, mad with terrible pain, tried to run out into the air.

The American administration still says that 2.5 thousand people died then, only the population density in the city was such that, most likely, at least 20 thousand died. Another 70 thousand people remained disabled. In that area, to this day, children are born with terrible deformities. What man-made accidents can compete with leaks of potent poisons?

Radioactive Disasters

One of the most dangerous varieties of man-made disasters. Radiation not only kills living organisms, but also provokes an avalanche-like increase in cellular damage and mutations: animals and people exposed to radiation almost certainly remain sterile, they develop numerous cancerous tumors, and their offspring, even if they can be born, very often affected by genetic defects. The first man-made accidents and disasters of this kind began to occur at the time when the mass operation of nuclear power plants and reactors that produced weapons-grade uranium and plutonium began.

Not so long ago, everyone followed the events in the Japanese town of Fukushima: this station, judging by what is happening there now, will poison the Pacific Ocean with radioactive water for many hundreds of years. The Japanese still cannot eliminate the consequences, and they are unlikely to succeed, since the molten nuclear fuel has gone far into the coastal soil. If we describe "radioactive" man-made accidents in Russia and the former USSR, then two cases come to mind at once: Chernobyl and the Mayak plant in the Chelyabinsk region. And if he knows about the Chernobyl nuclear power plant almosteveryone, then the accident at the Mayak is known to a few. It happened in 1957.

Ten years earlier, in 1947, it became finally clear that the country urgently needed a huge amount of weapons-grade uranium-235. To resolve this issue, a large enterprise for the production of nuclear weapons components was built in the closed city of Ozersk. In the process, an enormous amount of radioactive waste was generated. They merged into special "banks" located in cavities carved into the rock. They were cooled using a steel coil. By the end of 1956, one of the tubes was leaky, and the containers stopped cooling. A year later, the volume of active waste reached a critical mass and it all exploded…

Another example

But not always the concept of a man-made accident implies explosions, fires and/or terrorist attacks. An ideal example is the American medical (!) drug Therac-25, which went into serial production in 1982. Initially, it was a triumph of American physicians: the most complex means for radiation therapy was created exclusively by means of computer calculations! Only later it turned out that the “medicine” is exclusively radioactive, there is still no exact data on the number of its victims. Given that it was discontinued only a year later, the number of victims is certainly impressive…

In both cases described above, the causes of man-made accidents are banal - miscalculations in the initial design. At the time of the creation of Mayak, people practically did not know aboutthe fact that conventional materials degrade at an incredible rate in conditions of increased background radiation, and the Americans were let down by confidence in artificial intelligence and the greed of the heads of pharmaceutical companies.

Biohazard release

This term is most often understood as the entry into the external environment of biological weapons: combat strains of plague, cholera, smallpox, etc. It is clear that authorities around the world prefer not to talk about such incidents. Have there been such man-made accidents in Russia? It is hard to say. But in the USSR this was exactly the case. It happened in April 1979 in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg). Then several dozen people at once fell ill with anthrax, and the strain of the pathogen was very unusual and did not correspond to the natural one.

There are two versions of what happened: an accidental leak from a secret research institute and a sabotage act. Contrary to the opinion about “spy mania” among the Soviet leadership, the second version has the right to life: experts have repeatedly noted that outbreaks of the disease covered the place of the alleged “release” unevenly. This suggests that there were several sources of leakage. Moreover, in the very "epicenter", near the ill-fated research institute, the number of cases was scanty. Most of the victims lived much further away. And further. The radio station "Voice of America" told about what happened on the morning of April 5. At this time, only a couple of cases of the disease were recorded, and they were diagnosed with pneumonia.

Sudden collapse of buildings

As a rule, the causes of man-made accidents and disasters of this type are gross violations at the stage of designing and erecting buildings. The initiating factor is the activity of heavy equipment, adverse meteorological conditions, etc. Environmental pollution is minimal, but often the accident is accompanied by the death of a large number of people.

Transvaal Park is a perfect example. This is an entertainment complex in Moscow whose roof collapsed on February 14, 2004. At that moment, there were at least 400 people in the building, and at least 1/3 of them were children who came with their parents to the children's pool. A total of 28 people died, eight children. The total number of wounded is 51 people, at least 20 children. Initially, the version of the attack was considered, but everything turned out to be much worse: the designer saved as much as possible on construction, as a result of which the supporting structures were more decorative than real support for the roof. Under a relatively small load of snow, she collapsed on the heads of people resting.

Collapse of energy systems

These incidents can be divided into two categories:

• Accidents at power plants, accompanied by a long interruption in power supply.
• Accidents on the power supply networks, as a result of which consumers again find themselves deprived of the supply of electricity or other energy resources.

For example, on May 25, 2005, such a collapse occurred in the city of Moscow, as a result of which not only a fewlarge areas of the metropolis, but also many suburban areas, as well as some settlements near Kaluga and Ryazan. Several thousand people were blocked in subway trains for some time, many doctors performed critical operations literally by the light of flashlights.

What to do if you find yourself in the midst of a man-made disaster

And now we will consider personal safety in man-made accidents. More precisely, measures to preserve it. What if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time? First of all, no matter how trite it may sound, try not to panic, because in this state people die first of all. Having mastered the emotions, you should try to either get out to a more or less safe place, or make your way to the emergency exit (in case of fire, for example). Avoid breathing air saturated with dust particles, gases or smoke. To this end, it is necessary to use cotton-gauze bandages or simply tear off unnecessary items of clothing, moisten them with water and breathe through these pieces of fabric. It is very important that the impromptu headband is made from natural materials!

Don't try to be a hero by leaving the epicenter of a disaster on your own: you should cooperate with other victims and wait for the rescue teams to arrive. In the event that accidents occurred during the cold season, it is necessary to try to save energy by collecting all available food and warm clothes. If you are in an open area, usethe attention of rescuers by lighting signal fires or using special rocket launchers (if available).