reached 700 incidents since February 1. These events are primarily gathered
from a daily google search of news headlines around the world on selected
keywords. I thought I would give a quick summary of the types of events
recorded in this way over 6 months.
Disclaimer: I consider this system of collecting information anecdotal
rather than systematically collected data, so the raw data has not reviewed
for consistency and rounding errors have been allowed to stand.
With that in mind, of the 700 total events since February 1:
257 (37%) are in the industrial sector
121 (17%) are transportation events
70 (10%) are lab events
79 (11%) are household events
72 (10%) are illegal events (interestingly, only about half of the reported
illegal events are related to meth labs)
Of these events, 33 (5%) resulted in deaths and 156 (22%) resulted in injuries.
I last gave one of these summaries at the end of April. The primary difference
I see between the first three months and the second three months is in
terms of frequency as the number of events reported has risen from about
3.5 a day to 4 a day. It appears that this is driven primarily by an increase
in transportation events. I suspect that this related to increased truck
traffic in the summer.
People can use the tagging system at the URL mentioned above to further
explore this data. If you'd like the information in Excel format so that
you can do your own exploration of it, please let me know.
- Ralph
Ralph Stuart
Environmental Safety Manager
University of Vermont
rstuart**At_Symbol_Here**uvm.edu
