Project Abstract
Most effort in health and safety is focussed on prevention of the hazard. However these barriers can be overcome such that the hazard emerges as an accident. At this stage the next level of defences are the emergency response plans. However these too may be overwhelmed, either by the scale of the accident or because they were too fragile in the first place. In such situations the failure of the technology system may result in a catastrophe where multiple lives are lost or great damage occurs to physical assets or the natural environment. Consequently there is a need to better understand the causes of fragility in disaster mitigation. The area under examination is catastrophic failure of engineering systems. The starting point for the project is the Bowtie Methodology of hazard prevention and disaster recovery, and the objective is to extend this to better understand the causes of fragility in the response Mechanisms (as opposed to the preventative Barriers). This project is suitable for masters or PhD studie
