Today, the DCHAS pinboard incident list at 
http://www.pinboard.in/dchas 
reached 700 incidents since February 1. These events are primarily 
gathered from a daily google search of news headlines around the world 
on selected keywords. I thought I would give a quick summary of the 
types of events recorded in this way over 6 months. 

Disclaimer: I consider this system of collecting information anecdotal 
rather than systematically collected data, so the raw data has not 
reviewed for consistency and rounding errors have been allowed to stand. 

With that in mind, of the 700 total events since February 1:
257 (37%)  are in the industrial sector 
121 (17%) are transportation events
70 (10%) are lab events
79 (11%) are household events 
72 (10%) are illegal events (interestingly, only about half of the 
reported illegal events are related to meth labs)

Of these events, 33 (5%) resulted in deaths and 156 (22%) resulted in 
injuries.

I last gave one of these summaries at the end of April. The primary 
difference I see between the first three months and the second three 
months is in terms of frequency as the number of events reported has 
risen from about 3.5 a day to 4 a day. It appears that this is driven 
primarily by an increase in transportation events. I suspect that this 
related to increased truck traffic in the summer.

People can use the tagging system at the URL mentioned above to further 
explore this data. If you'd like the information in Excel format so that 
you can do your own exploration of it, please let me know.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart
Environmental Safety Manager
University of Vermont

rstuart**At_Symbol_Here**uvm.edu

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