Environment

Air Town Hazard

Hazard

A hazard is a situation which poses a level of threat to life, health, property or environment. Most hazards are potential, with only a theoretical risk of harm, however, once a hazard become 'active', it can create an emergency situation.

A hazard is usually used to describe a potentially harmful situation, although not usually the event itself, once the incident has started it is classified as an emergency or incident.

By its nature, a hazard involves something which could potentially be harmful to a person's life, health, property or to the environment. There are a number of methods of classifying a hazard, but most systems use some variation on the factors of likelihood of the hazard turning into an incident and the seriousness of the incident if it were to occur.

Unplanned industrialization and urbanization are causing health hazard mainly in developing countries. It is essential to assess the magnitude of future air hazard in an industrial town. This may indicate that the main work force is exposed to the health hazard due to industrial and traffic pollution.

Traffic is a major cause of particulate pollution in the urban environment. While this may not be news to those living next to the highway, the exact cause of the pollution and possible solutions is something that we should sit up and notice. Traffic emissions result from either the combustion process and the vehicle emissions from diesel combustion engine create two kinds of fine particles, soot particles and nucleation particles. Soot, as you may know is basically just amorphous carbon compounds, like what you might find inside your chimney. Nucleation particles are liquid like particles that can be composed of some very small center particle along with sulfuric acid and other hydrocarbons along for the ride. It is the elusive nucleation particles that dominate at the roadside and appear to be most closely related to increased traffic.

Methods and techniques for identification, monitoring and management of natural hazards in high mountain areas are enumerated and described. In the past two decades, both the need for, and the ability to, accurately identify potential hazards have increased. The need for accurate information and monitoring comes about as a result of rapid growth in population, settlements, transportation infrastructure and intensified land uses and, therefore, risk and vulnerability in mountain areas.

The hazard assessment of the vegetated slopes are reviewed of the stability of the slope both with and without vegetation, soil erosion and the stability of the vegetated slope from wind throw and snow loading.

The impact of air transport, although the detrimental effects of air_pollution on human health have been brought widely to public notice, it appears that less attention has been given to the potential role of toxic air pollutants in the induction of allergic conditions such as asthma, rhinoconjunctivitis, and atopic eczema.

The transport-induced air quality problems are defined in terms of economic and social factors leading to the development of a car based economy. The nature of future air quality problems will require an integration of traffic management, land use, public transport and pollution control policies.