Abstract
Generally speaking, good safety means good business, but demonstrating this to senior management is not always straight forward. By combining traditional QRA techniques with 3BL concepts, where the drivers are environmental and economic performance as well as social, QRA can be applied to more than the management of safety. The “Q” of QRA need not be fatalities, but could equally be effects on the environment, down-time or financial loss. By quantifying impacts on people, assets and the environment in financial terms, analysts are better able to estimate the impact of incidents on the business as a whole.
Accidents like Buncefield have put the risk from hazardous installations high on the agenda of regulators, operators and the public at large. Regulatory regimes for ensuring the safety of those in and around major accident hazard sites are becoming more demanding. The need for accuracy and transparency has increased and stakeholders are interested in more than compliance – they want to ensure best possible performance in terms of minimising societal, environmental and economic risk. The so-called triple bottom line captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organisational success in economic, environmental and social terms. A commitment to corporate social responsibility implies a commitment to some form of 3BL reporting. So why not extend this to risk reporting? This paper describes use of the Phast Risk QRA tool (Cavanagh et al, 2009; Cavanagh, 2010) to assess the financial risks associated with hazardous installations. The software model allows a library of asset types to be created from which individual assets, such as buildings or process equipment, can be placed on your GIS map. Each asset has a set of associated vulnerability parameters, from which the financial impact of damage through exposure to hazardous outcomes (e.g. radiation or explosion overpressure) can be assessed. Typical outputs from the model include F-Cost curves, analogous with F-N curves used in assessment of societal risk, but where N is financial loss rather number of fatalities. A case study is used to illustrate the concepts and describe how they can add value to the broader business risk assessment activities.
