부산대학교 도서관

Safety and quality assessment systems are very important in manufacture, storage, transportation, and handling of hazardous materials(hazmat) to prevent hazmat disasters. At present, hazardous materials exist everywhere in our daily lives with various forms of plastics, household products of cleaning and washing detergents, fertilizers or petroleum-related products. However, hazardous materials are dangerous substances when they are released to human or environment. Hazardous materials become very widely used substances in the age of oil-based industrial economy. The Korean Ministry of Environment (KMOE) describes about one hundred thousand types of chemicals are produced and used worldwide. Over four hundred new chemicals are introduced in every year. A crucial question for the Korean hazardous material management may have been raised: Will you be safe from hazardous material incidents? The gas leak disaster at Union Carbide s Bhopal, India in 1984 that made over 6,400 people killed and 30,000 to 40,000 people seriously injured is the representative case for the safety of hazmat. Korea becomes vulnerable to hazmat disaster due to the development of high-tech industry. Thus, the risk assessment system is required to Korea for transferring abandoned hazmat management systems to self-correcting safety systems. This research analyzed characteristics of various hazmat incidents applying statistical analysis methods including frequency analysis or analysis of category data to hazmat incidents for ten years. All of three analyses of category data indicate the significance of causality between hazmat incident site groups and seasons, regional groups, and incident casualty groups.