By their nature, the manufacture, storage, and transportation of chemical substances are accidents waiting to occur. Chemicals could be corrosive, toxic, and will react explosively. The impacts of chemical accidents will be deadly, for each human beings and the surroundings. Causes behind such disasters range from human errors to the usage of outdated equipment and the careless handling of dangerous chemical substances.

One of the deadliest chemical accidents came about in 1984 at a pesticide plant in the state of Medhya Pradesh in central India. On the midnight between December 2nd and third, a combination of things ranging from hazardous handling of dangerous chemical substances to the usage of outdated and malfunctioning industrial tools led to the publicity of over 500,000 folks to toxic gases and byproducts, resulting in practically three,800 officially confirmed human deaths.

In September 2001 an explosion occurred in a shed containing about 300 tones of downgraded ammonium nitrate at a chemical plant in Toulouse, belonging to one of France’s main fertilizer producers. The explosion induced 31 deaths and injured greater than four,500 folks, while destroying 27,000 buildings in the realm.

In 2005, a catastrophe at a major petroleum refinery in Texas City, United States, was thought-about US’ worst industrial disaster in 15 years. A series of explosions passed off when a hydrocarbon isomerization unit was restarted and a distillation tower flooded with hydrocarbons. In consequence, 15 were killed and another 180 had been injured.

In June 1974, close to the village of Flixborough within the United Kingdom, happened an event which led to a big tightening of the UK authorities’s laws masking hazardous industrial processes. A locally owned chemical plant, whereas repairing certainly one of its chemical reactors, produced in less than a minute a leak of 40 tones of cyclohexane, which formed a vapor cloud with a diameter of about 200 m. The cloud exploded and completely destroyed the plant, additionally damaging about 1,800 buildings on a greater than 1,5 km radius.

In February 2000 a poisonous chemical spill that happened within the Romanian city of Baia Mare destroyed wildlife and fish stocks while threatening the water supplies of 2.5 million people all over the Central and Eastern Europe. Approximately 100,000 m3 of cyanide, used within the gold extraction course of at a local mine, was released into the river Somes when a reservoir wall on the mine collapsed. The occasion was described as Europe’s worst disaster since Chernobyl.