Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:09:30 -0400
Reply-To: roberth_hill**At_Symbol_Here**mindspring.com
Sender: DCHAS-L Discussion List <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU>
From: roberth_hill**At_Symbol_Here**MINDSPRING.COM
Subject: Re: Chemical Safety headlines summary, first 6 months
Ralph,this is really useful to many of us.  It gives us a much better idea about the kinds of incidents that go on, and how the media often get things wrong. It is not much of surprise that there is little follow up on incidents since most places don't want further information or publicity released about incidents associated with their organizations. 

Thanks for doing this.  Bob  

-----Original Message-----
>From: "Secretary, ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety" 
>Sent: Jul 26, 2010 8:45 AM
>To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU
>Subject: [DCHAS-L] Chemical Safety headlines summary, first 6 months
>
>Today, the DCHAS pinboard incident list at 
>http://www.pinboard.in/dchas 
>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

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