Free Custom «Disaster Preparedness Measures» Essay Paper

Our next responsibility was to devise planning measures that stakeholders involved in the Buncefield type of business should undertake to ensure that no such disasters are reported in future. These disaster preparedness measures contain other recommendations that have been published by organizations and deals with businesses related to oil products.

First, we recommend the Competent Authority to ensure that the oil depots operators review their emergency occurrences policies and measures so to detect the incidences such as oil spillage and oil tank explosions.

Secondly, we recommend that the oil business operators should update themselves with the COMAH regulations and HSE policies and guidelines on disaster preparedness and mitigations. Furthermore, they need to fully support the HSEs hazardous investigation Directors in visiting them and giving necessary measures deemed fit to reduce disaster occurrence. Lastly, it is recommendable for the Competent Authority to assess the vulnerability of the oil company to disaster so as to implement necessary measures for preventing a disaster.

Buncefield vs. Sachangwan Fire Tragedy in Kenya

Kenya is one of the less developed countries, where a large proportion of people survive in a less than one dollar per day. On 31 January 2009, at a place called Sachangwan near Molo town, which is approximately 230 kilometers from Nairobi, a petroleum tanker carrying about 10000 litres of petrol was involved in an accident which causes a massive spillage which ultimately led to fire (Freudenburg & Gramling 2011). At the incidence, over 300 people lost their lives, while other 1000 people were seriously injured. The reason behind this is that immediately after the overturning of the lorry, people rushed to fetch petrol with buckets for sale. Unfortunately, fire broke out and only few managed to evade he tragedy (White 2011). In the following month, in February 2009, a train crushed with two wagons along Naivasha road carrying over 100,000 lifters of oil, leaving over 120 people dead and thousands of people with severe fire blisters. It was reported that they fetch oil for cooking (Carey 2010).

This depicts how the less developed countries are vulnerable to oil fire disasters compared to those in developed countries. Fire mitigation and disaster preparedness measures applied by less developed countries are poor and inadequate, and the government does very little in implementation of appropriate fire disaster management measures.

The less developed countries as compared to the more developed ones will continue to face the challenges of disasters as they lack appropriate and modern measures to mitigate and prepare for them (Kelman 2012). People lack sufficient information on fire disaster prevention and management strategies. This means that they will continue to lose more lives to fire disasters. So far, no adequate measures have been taken by Kenyan Government so as to prevent incidences such as those of Sachangwan (Singh 2011).

Conclusion

It is vital for any country to institute adequate measures necessary to mitigate fire outbreaks. Less developed country need to fully embrace and implement the above named recommendations so as to prevent and to reduce the impacts of fire outbreaks from oil spillage. For the developed countries, they must also continue to implement more stringent measure as no measures are ever enough for disaster prevention.