Iran Occupational Health

 Background and aims: All over the world, and particularly in industrialized countries, the transport of hazardous materials has till years a continuously increasing trend. Public concern is focused mainly on road and rail transport, since the routes used for road and rail transportation of hazardous substances necessarily come closer and sometimes also cross densely populated areas. In this study 322 accidents that occurred during the road transport of hazardous materials (hazmat) in Iran from 2008 to 2012 was carried out.

Methods: In this study, causes of accidents, accident frequency, characteristics of location, type of material involved in the accidents, the distribution of risks of accidents, accidents frequency, population affected by road traffic accidents, social risks of hazardous materials accidents and environmental factors affecting the distribution of the accidents were examined.

Results: The results showed , causes of accident were human factors (60.67%), followed by vehicle transport (17.83%), environmental factors (11.44%) and packaging and loading (10.06).

Conclusion: Study showed that the frequency of accidents has increased significantly in recent years and the need for improve safety measures revealed. Keywords: Hazmat transportation, Road accidents, Event tree analysis.