Abstract
Major accidents unfortunately occur with a certain frequency in industry. Sometimes these accidents are of truly catastrophic proportions. There naturally come to mind events such as the leak and subsequent release of a toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate in the Indian city of Bhopal on 12 March 1984, resulting in 3787 fatalities (although some sources calculate the total as being up to 20.000, including ensuing fatalities over the years) . These occurrences are frequently categorised as being unpredictable and perhaps beyond human control (in Anglo-Saxon legal terminology, ‘acts of God’).
Quite the opposite, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that catastrophic occurrences over the last one hundred years have conformed to a well-known statistical distribution and, as a consequence, were entirely foreseeable. Demonstrating this will open the way to the following issues:Are events with consequences even exceeding those observed to date (for simplicity, referred to as trans- Bhopal events) possible?Must the possibility of catastrophic events (of Bhopal and even trans-Bhopal category) be accepted with fatalistic resignation or, on the contrary, are there effective tools available to prevent such events.
