Journal ArticleDOI
Industrial accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning: lessons learned from a database analysis
TLDR
In this paper, the authors analyzed the dynamics of Natech events, accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning recorded in industrial accident databases, and identified the most vulnerable equipment types, their modes of failure due to natural event impact and the final accident scenarios.Abstract:
Natural hazards and disasters can cause major accidents in chemical and process installations. These so-called Natech accidents can result in hazardous-materials releases due to damage to process and storage units, or pipes. In order to understand the dynamics of Natech events, accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning recorded in industrial accident databases were analysed. This allowed the identification of the most vulnerable equipment types, their modes of failure due to natural-event impact and the final accident scenarios. Moreover, lessons learned for future accident prevention and mitigation were derived. The analysis showed that pipes and storage tanks are the most vulnerable equipment for earthquakes, floods and lightning, calling for more research of equipment behaviour under natural-event loading. The damage modes and states are strongly dependent on the characteristics of the impacting natural event. Toxic dispersion, fires and explosions were observed as a consequence of all three types of analysed natural events. In the case of floods, two additional scenarios were identified. These are water contamination and the formation of toxic and/or flammable vapours upon reaction of the released chemicals with the floodwaters. The overall number of recorded Natech accidents was found to range from 2 to 5% of all reported accidents in the analysed databases.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Critical infrastructure, panarchies and the vulnerability paths of cascading disasters
TL;DR: In this paper, a new theoretical approach to cascading events in terms of their root causes and lack of predictability is proposed, and the authors demonstrate how cascades reflect the ways in which panarchies collapse.
Journal ArticleDOI
Impact of the 11 March 2011, Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami on the chemical industry
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of data collected from open sources and through interviews with authorities was performed to understand the main reasons for the industrial damage and downtime as well as the extent of hazardous-materials releases and the associated impact on society.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multi-hazard and multi-risk decision-support tools as a part of participatory risk governance: feedback from civil protection stakeholders
Nadejda Komendantova,Nadejda Komendantova,Roger Mrzyglocki,Arnaud Mignan,Bijan Khazai,Friedemann Wenzel,Anthony Patt,Anthony Patt,Kevin Fleming +8 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify perceptions of two decision-making tools, which involve multi-hazard and multi-risk, based on the feedback from stakeholders, and find that interest in multirisk assessment is high but that its application remains hampered by the complexity of processes involved.
Journal ArticleDOI
Quantitative assessment of domino and NaTech scenarios in complex industrial areas
Valerio Cozzani,Giacomo Antonioni,Gabriele Landucci,Alessandro Tugnoli,Sarah Bonvicini,Gigliola Spadoni +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, an innovative methodologies developed for the quantitative assessment of risk due to domino and NaTech scenarios are presented, and the results of the improved models obtained for NaTech quantitative assessment were compared to previous results in the literature.
Journal ArticleDOI
Industrial accidents triggered by natural hazards: an emerging risk issue
TL;DR: In this article, the threat of natural hazards impacting chemical facilities and infrastructures with the subsequent release of hazardous substances has been recognised as an emerging risk which is likely to be exacerbated by the ongoing climate change.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
A study of storage tank accidents
James I. Chang,Cheng-Chung Lin +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a Fishbone Diagram is applied to analyze the causes that lead to storage tank accidents and corrective actions are also provided to help operating engineers handling similar situations in the future.
Journal ArticleDOI
Natural and technologic hazardous material releases during and after natural disasters: a review.
TL;DR: This systematic review summarizes direct and indirect disaster-associated releases, as well as environmental contamination and adverse human health effects that have resulted from natural disaster-related hazmat incidents.
Journal ArticleDOI
ARAMIS project: a comprehensive methodology for the identification of reference accident scenarios in process industries.
TL;DR: The work carried out in the part of the project devoted to the definition of accident scenarios, which is the building of a methodology for the identification of major accident hazards (MIMAH), and an application on an ethylene oxide storage.
Journal ArticleDOI
Industrial accidents triggered by flood events: Analysis of past accidents
TL;DR: Analysis of process equipment damage modes allowed the identification of the expected release extents due to different water impact types during floods, and was used to generate substance-specific event trees for the quantitative assessment of the consequences of accidents triggered by floods.
Journal ArticleDOI
Seismic risk of atmospheric storage tanks in the framework of quantitative risk analysis
TL;DR: In this paper, some considerations regarding the intensity and probability of occurrence of earthquakes and the vulnerability of atmospheric storage tanks subjected to seismic actions have been given, and suggestions concerning industrial seismic-related accidental scenarios are also given.