Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ACCIDENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
However, just as the iceberg that sank the Titanic revealed but a tiny fraction
of its full dangerous form to the doomed ship, the chief risk to life posed by travelling
is largely unappreciated. Road traffic accidents claim well over a million lives per
year worldwide, the ninth biggest cause of all deaths (Murray et al. 2001). Such
deaths occur so regularly and so universally that they tend not to attract the sort of
attention given to sporadic ferry, rail or air crashes and so are almost uncontroversial.
Structural accidents
Like transport accidents, disasters due to structural failure have happened for as long
as such human activity has occurred, but have become far more common and
dangerous in the industrialized age. In contrast to transport accidents, however,
Table 9.2 gives a fuller representation of the overall death toll and indicates that the
threat posed by structural accidents has lessened over recent decades rather than
coming to be accepted.
Table 9.2 The world’s worst structural accidents
Place Date Type No. killed
1 Santiago, Chile 1863 Fire in a church 2000 c
2 Chungking, China1949 Spread of dockside fire 1700 a, b
3 Canton, China 1845 Theatre fire 1670 a
4 Hakodate, Japan 1934 Urban fire caused by chimney
collapse
1500 a
5 Mecca, Saudi Arabia 1990 Collapse of pedestrian tunnel 1426 b
6 Shanghai 1871 Theatre fire 900 a
7 Vienna1881 Theatre fire 850 a
8 St Petersburg 1836 Fire at Circus 800 a
9 Antoung, China1937 CinemaFire 658 a
10 Hong Kong 1918 Sports stadium collapse and fire 604 a
Note: Excludes structural disasters instigated by natural phenomena.
Sources: a Ash (2001), b CRED (2003), c Smith (2001: 319).
Improved safety standards for public buildings in most countries have seen
deaths reduced from a highpoint of the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of
the twentieth centuries. However, accidents of this form cannot be eliminated
altogether in a modern world characterized by crowded urban living and working. It
is instructive to note that the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed most of
the city, claimed only an estimated six lives.
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