Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

19.3 Summary

Every year hundreds of events occur because of which a village, town, or city is affected by man-made or natural disasters. In many of these events, hundreds to thousands of people are affected. For instance, during the December 26, 2004, Tsunami in Indonesia, over 2,00,000 people died (9). If the coastal residents had lived away from the coast and not directly on it, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. If the Fukushima reactors would have been built away from the coast and or better protected from Tsunamis, then the potential for the reactors to be damaged would have been significantly less. A risk perspective must be applied to the placement of factories, schools, residential areas, waste facilities, nuclear and conventional power plants, and even highways to minimize the potential for loss of life and destruction of the environment.