Abstract
Over the past decades, safety has been permeating process industry with the aim to ensure the protection of people involved in process plants and to prevent catastrophic events and industrial accidents that could be dangerous for the environment and the entire society. Nowadays, process industry requires specific and validated hazard assessment methods to understand the risks to which people are exposed. As a matter of fact, industrial accidents involving either installations or transportation of chemical compounds occur with relative high frequency and lead to many major accidents. QRA analysis (QRA is an acronym for Quantitative Risk Assessment) is a formal and systematic risk analysis approach for quantifying the risks associated with the operation of an engineering process. It can be used for the calculation of the economic and environmental impact that an industry could face after an incidental scenario has occurred, but its focus is on the loss of life; however, many pitfalls are hidden in this analysis, and we need to be aware of them and to avoid them.
The paper aims to show the so-called “Seven Deadly Sins” and the “Five Commandments” of QRA, highlighting through real cases and examples from more than thirty years long experience how small mistakes in the input data can generate enormous mistakes. It will also show the golden rules to ensure that a QRA will give as an output useful and meaningful results.
