Review and analysis of fire and explosion accidents in maritime transportation

The globally expanding shipping industry has several hazards such as collision, capsizing, foundering, grounding, stranding, fire, and explosion. Accidents are often caused by more than one contributing factor through complex interaction. It is crucial to identify root causes and their interactions to prevent and understand such accidents. This study presents a detailed review and analysis of fire and explosion accidents that occurred in the maritimetransportation industry during 1990–2015. The underlying causes of fire and explosion accidents are identified and analysed. This study also reviewed potential preventative measures to prevent such accidents. Additionally, this study compares properties of alternative fuels and analyses their effectiveness in mitigating fire and explosionhazards. It is observed that Cryogenic Natural Gas (CrNG), Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and methanol have properties more suitable than traditional fuels in mitigating fire risk and appropriate management of their hazards could make them a safer option to traditional fuels. However, for commercial use at this stage, there exist several uncertainties due to inadequate studies, and technological immaturity. This study provides an insight into fire and explosion accident causation and prevention, including the prospect of using alternative fuels for mitigating fire and explosion risks in maritime transportation

The robustness of flood insurance regimes given changing risk resulting from climate change

The changing risk of flooding associated with climate change presents different challenges for the different flood insurance market models in use around the world, which vary in respect of consumer structure and their risk transfer mechanism. A review of international models has been undertaken against three broad criteria for the functioning and sustainability of a flood insurance scheme: knowing the nature of the insurable risk; the availability of an insurable population; and the presence of a solvent insurer. The solvency of insurance markets appears strong, partly because insurers and reinsurers can choose to exclude markets which would give rise to insolvency or can diversify their portfolios to include offsetting perils. Changing risk may threaten solvency if increasing risk is not recognised and adjusted for but insurability of flood risk may be facilitated by the use of market based and hybrid schemes offering greater diversification and more flexibility. While encouragement of mitigation is in theory boosted by risk based pricing, availability and affordability of insurance may be negatively impacted. This threatens the sustainability of an insurable population, therefore the inclusion of the state in partnership is beneficial in ensuring continuity of cover, addressing equity issues and incentivising mitigation

The description-experience gap in risky choice : the role of sample size and experienced probabilities

Risky prospects come in different forms. Sometimes options are presented with convenient descriptions summarizing outcomes and their respective likelihoods. People can thus make decisions from description. In other cases people must call on their encounters with such prospects, making decisions from experience. Recent studies report a systematic and large description-experience gap. One key determinant of this gap is people`s tendency to rely on small samples resulting in substantial sampling error. Here we examine whether this gap exists even when people draw on large samples. Although smaller, the gap persists. We use the choices of the present and previous studies to test a large set of candidate strategies that model decisions from experience, including 12 heuristics, two associative-learning models and the two-stage model of cumulative prospect theory. This model analysis suggests-as one explanation for the remaining description-experience gap in large samples-that people treat probabilities differently in both types of decisions. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd