Pool fire is a typical example of fire accidents in chemical process industries. Since fire researchers have implemented a variety of measurements to gain insights into pool fire and to prevent fire disasters, there is a need to illustrate how pool fire models influence the risk assessment results. This review intends to consecutively discuss the effect of different physical factors on the burning behavior of pool fire and fire risk assessment. For the most part, this review extracts representative works from abundant pool fire articles in the last years and is subdivided into mass burning rates, entrainment, flame height, pulsation, radiation transfer sections, and risk assessment. On the basis of the latest research, it is indicated that new fire models can provide more accurate and reliable assessment results than previous models. They are not only to reduce the cumbersome work and resources but also to validate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models that are essential components of performance-based design in fire prevention. Consequently, providing the latest information about how pool fire evolves and how risk assessment is affected, this review paper would be advantageous to fire experts in the future.@en

Barriers are used in various forms to assure the safety of chemical plants. A deep understanding of the literature related to safety barriers is essential to tackle the challenges in improving their design and management. This paper first provides an overview of the history of the development of the safety barrier concept. Subsequently, this paper elaborates a systematic review of the definition, classification, evaluation, performance assessment, and management of safety barriers in the chemical process industries. Based on the literature review, this study proposes a practical classification of safety barriers benefiting the identification of performance indicators and the collection of indicator-related data for safety barriers. The safety barrier functions are extended and illustrated by involving the resilience concept. Performance assessment criteria are proposed corresponding to the adaptability and recoverability of the safety barriers. Finally, the management of safety barriers is discussed. The roadmap for future studies to develop integrated management of safety and security barriers to ensure the resilience of chemical plants is suggested.@en

Since the 1990s, domino effects have obtained increasing attention in the process and chemical industry. This chapter reviews the research on the assessment and management of domino effects. This chapter first summarizes the definitions, characteristics, and classifications of domino effects. The vulnerability models related to domino effects are reviewed, including deterministic methods, probabilistic methods, and CFD/FEM methods. Next, modeling methods are divided into three categories, and management strategies are divided into five categories. Then the representative assessment methods and management strategies in chemical plants and clusters are analyzed in detail. Besides, these assessment and management approaches are compared and analyzed to propose their applications. Moreover, this chapter identifies research gaps in this field, which provides the motivations of the chapters of this book.

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To objectively grasp the current situation and development trend of resilient cities or communities (RC) research. The articles in Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection databases from 1995 to 2022 were used as a sample, and bibliometrics was used to statistically analyze the year of publication and number of articles, highly cited documents and keyword hotness in this field. VOSviewer was used to explore the knowledge graph of RC research documents. The results show that: the development process is roughly divided into 3 periods: no attention (1995–2004), starting (2005–2014), and rapid growth (2015–2021). The journal “Sustainability” and “International journal of disaster risk reduction” are the key journals publishing RC research. Serre and Shaw are the most productive authors. The USA is still the leading country in this field of RC. Colorado State Univ, Texas a&m Univ, and Delft Univ Technol are the main research institutions. The keyword analysis indicates the hot topics in different periods. Moreover, several limitations and some recommendations for future research on RC are also given based on this.

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Many construction accidents occur in China each year, leading to a large number of deaths, injures, and property losses. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, little attention is paid to construction safety, resulting in severe accidents. To prevent construction accidents and learn to how address safety issues in future pandemics, this study proposed an improved STAMP (Systems Theoretic Accident Modeling and Processes) model to analyze the collapse accident of the Xinjia Express Hotel used for COVID-19 quarantine in China. Through the application of the STAMP approach, the causes of the construction accident and the relationship between various causal factors are analyzed from a systematic perspective. The identified causes are divided into five categories: contractors, management of organizations, technical methods, participants, and interactive feed-back. Finally, safety recommendations are drawn from this study to improve construction safety and safety management in pandemics.

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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the trade-off between economics and epidemic prevention (safety) has become painfully clear worldwide. This situation thus highlights the significance of balancing the economy with safety and health. Safety economics, considering the interdependencies between safety and micro-economics, is ideal for supporting this kind of decision-making. Although economic approaches such as cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis have been used in safety management, little attention has been paid to the fundamental issues and the primary methodologies in safety economics. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic study on safety economics to analyze the foundational issues and explore the possible approaches. Firstly, safety economics is defined as a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of academic research focusing on the interdependencies and coevolution of micro-economies and safety. Then we explore the role of safety economics in safety management and production investment. Furthermore, to make decisions more profitable, economic approaches are summarized and analyzed for decision-making about prevention investments and/or safety strategies. Finally, we discuss some open issues in safety economics and possible pathways to improve this research field, such as security economics, risk perception, and multi-criteria analysis.

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The terrorist attack on the Abqaiq oil plant in Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2019 attracted global attention to the significant role of safety and security in the sustainable oil and gas supply chain and the vulnerability of supply infrastructures subject to intentional and unintentional damages. Different from other oil and gas supply infrastructures, oil and gas pipelines may be more vulnerable to accidental, natural and intentional threats due to their widespread distribution. Therefore a systematic and thorough review is carried out to investigate safety and security of oil and gas pipelines based on bibliometric analysis. First, a total of 598 publications between 1970 and 2019 related to safety and security of oil and natural gas pipelines was retrieved and refined from the database of Web of Science (WoS). The 598 publications are analyzed by the bibliometric software VOSviewer to obtain the temporal and regional distribution of publications, to identify “productive institutions” and “productive authors”, and create the cooperation networks between institutions and authors. Besides, the evolution of research topics and research methods are identified based on keywords and bibliographic analysis. Moreover, the main research topics and research methods are analyzed to obtain insight into the research evolutions and trends. Risk assessment, leakage, and corrosion are the main topics while QRA, fuzzy theory and the Bayesian network are the most frequently used research methods. To further improve the sustainability of oil and gas pipelines, this study provides and discusses future research needs such as pipeline security, environmental sustainability, pipeline system resilience. According to these results, the research on risk assessment based on Bayesian network and consequence analysis using CFD may increase in the future. Besides, more research and guidelines on pipeline security, resilience, and environmental impacts to better protect pipelines, are expected.

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Multi-hazard accidents in process industries, which can cause more severe consequences compared to individual accidents, have gained growing attention from administrators and scholars in recent years. With the development of process industries and the expansion of the urban area, high-risk zones may emerge in densely populated areas. Accurate risk assessment of the multi-hazard accidents in process industries is essential for protecting properties, human life, and the environment. This study reviews past studies on the risk assessment of three types of multi-hazard accidents in process industries: Natech events, domino effects, and concurrent hazards. The development trends of risk assessment of multi-hazard accidents are analyzed and the research gasps of past research are identified. Based on the identified gaps in previous research, future perspectives on multi-hazard research in process industries are discussed. To improve the assessment methods for multi-hazard risks, more advanced basic models and applicative risk analysis methods are required. Considering multi-hazard interactions and other factors are also important for process plants against multi hazards. This study can potentially contribute to developing better risk assessment models of multi-hazard accidents and therefore safer and resilient process industries.@en

Kenmerkend voor bedrijven die in een cluster gelegen zijn, zijn de onderlinge risico’s waarbij de risico’s van één bedrijf aanleiding kunnen geven tot nieuwe risico’s bij een aangrenzend of een nabijgelegen bedrijf. Daarbij gaat het om de mogelijkheid op domino-effecten, keteneffecten, of nadelige effecten (letsel/schade). Voor (petro)chemische bedrijven die geografisch nabij andere bedrijven liggen, is het bijgevolg noodzakelijk om (proces)veiligheid niet aan te pakken als een geïsoleerd bedrijf, maar in samenwerking met de nabijgelegen bedrijven, om zo ook de onderlinge risico’s optimaal te beheersen. Samenwerking tussen bedrijven wordt dus gezien als dé sleutel tot het doelmatig aanpakken van onderlinge risico’s. Deze studie heeft als doel om deze samenwerking tussen geclusterde bedrijven te faciliteren, meer concreet te maken, en te optimaliseren. Om dit te bewerkstelligen is een praktische tool ontwikkeld. Een (sub)cluster van (petro)chemische bedrijven kan de tool gezamenlijk gebruiken om op een optimale en onderbouwde manier samenwerkingsinitiatieven op te zetten om de onderlinge risico’s te beheersen, en om zo de (cluster)veiligheid te verhogen. Ten minste twee bedrijven die geografisch dicht bij elkaar gevestigd zijn, kunnen aan de slag gaan met de tool. Minstens één bedrijf heeft hierbij een BRZO-status. Verder is de tool bruikbaar voor zowel BRZO-bedrijven met en zonder een domino-effect aanwijzing, voor bedrijven die (net) onder de BRZO-drempel vallen, en voor niet-(petro)chemische bedrijven. In de praktische tool (in de vorm van een Excel-file) zijn verschillende algemene veiligheidsparameters opgenomen en daarbij horend meer specifieke veiligheidsinitiatieven. Hierbij gaat het om initiatieven die bedrijven samen kunnen opzetten om de onderlinge risico’s te beheren en te beheersen. In de tool ligt de focus op zowel proactieve als reactieve veiligheidsparameters. Er zijn vijf proactieve veiligheidsparameters geformuleerd waarbij de focus ligt op het voorkomen van ongewenste gebeurtenissen: -Het uitwisselen van veiligheidsinformatie -Het beoordelen en beheersen van onderlinge risico’s op clusterniveau -Leren van elkaar -Uniformiteit en standaardisatie van veiligheid -De cluster van bedrijven als collectief Er zijn twee reactieve veiligheidsparameters geformuleerd waarbij de focus ligt op het mitigeren van de gevolgen als er toch een ongewenste gebeurtenis plaatsvindt: -Gedeelde calamiteitenuitrusting en -faciliteiten -Gezamenlijke noodorganisatie en crisiscommunicatie Deze veiligheidsparameters zijn in de tool uiteengezet in verschillende meer specifieke veiligheidsinitiatieven. De (sub)cluster van bedrijven die aan de slag gaat met de tool zal voor alle specifieke veiligheidsinitiatieven gezamenlijk de huidige prestatie (stap 1) en de haalbaarheid scoren (stap 2). In stap 1 scoren de bedrijven de huidige prestatie, gaande van een optimale prestatie tot een suboptimale prestatie of de afwezigheid van samenwerking wat betreft het te scoren veiligheidsinitiatief. In stap 2 scoren de bedrijven de haalbaarheid van de veiligheidsinitiatieven. Aan de hand van meerdere criteria (zoals onder meer risicoreductie potentieel, kosten, concurrentiegevoeligheid, en invloed van het (moeder)bedrijf) wordt er door de bedrijven een inschatting gemaakt van de haalbaarheid van de veiligheidsinitiatieven. Vervolgens worden op basis van een achterliggend algoritme de veiligheidsinitiatieven automatisch gerangschikt naargelang potentiële veiligheidswinst. Men krijgt dus als uitkomst een prioriteitsstelling van veiligheidsparameters, waarbij de hoogst gerankte veiligheidsparameters de meeste veiligheidswinst kunnen opleveren voor een bepaalde cluster. Door het toekennen van de huidige prestatie en de haalbaarheid houdt de rangschikking rekening met de reeds aanwezige (geïnstitutionaliseerde) veiligheidsparameters, en met de specifieke context van een bepaalde cluster. De tool is uniek in die zin dat er gefocust wordt op gezamenlijkheid. De prioriteitsstelling van de veiligheidsparameters zal toelaten om op een onderbouwde en optimale manier te bepalen waarop men als (sub)cluster van bedrijven samen kan inzetten om tot veiligheidswinst te komen m.b.t. onderlinge risico’s. De tool kan gezien worden als het startpunt om een hoger gezamenlijk veiligheidsniveau te bereiken, waarbij de uitkomst van de tool het vertrekpunt kan zijn om concrete veiligheidsinitiatieven (verder) vorm te geven. De tool focust op het aanpakken van onderlinge risico’s, waardoor de veiligheid van de gehele cluster geoptimaliseerd wordt. Hierbij zal ook de omgevingsveiligheid geoptimaliseerd worden, aangezien het gehele gebied waarin de geclusterde bedrijven functioneren veiliger wordt als de onderlinge risico’s beter beheerst worden.@en

A disruption to hazardous (flammable, explosive, and toxic) material (HAZMAT) storage plants may trigger escalation effects, resulting in more severe storage performance losses and making the performance restoration more difficult. The disruption, such as an intentional attack, may be difficult to predict and prevent, thus developing a resilient HAZMAT storage plant may be a practical and effective way to deal with these disruptions. This study develops a dynamic stochastic methodology to quantify the resilience of HAZMAT storage plants. In this methodology, resilience evolution scenarios are modeled as a dynamic process that consists of four stages: disruption, escalation, adaption, and restoration stages. The resistant capability in the disruption stage, mitigation capability in the escalation stage, adaption capability in the adaption stage, and restoration capability in the restoration stage are quantified to obtain the HAZMAT storage resilience. The uncertainties in the disruption stage and the mitigation stage are considered, and the dynamic Monte Carlo method is used to simulate possible resilience scenarios and thus quantify the storage resilience. A case study is used to illustrate the developed methodology, and a discussion based on the case study is provided to find out the critical parameters and resilience measures.

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Subsea gas release is an industrial hazard that can impose fire hazards on offshore facilities near the gas surfacing area. However, risk assessment of the fire caused by subsea gas release is challenged due to inadequate recognition of the knowledge of subsea gas release mechanism and resulting hazards. At present, minimal researches involving risk assessment of offshore fire resulting from a subsea gas release were reported, and this paper is an extension of the previous works on subsea gas behavior. This paper focuses on modeling fire risk on offshore facilities due to subsea gas release. A numerical simulation is carried out using the Computational Fluid Dynamic technique of Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) to analyze fire propagation characteristics and assess the impact of fire on personnel and assets. A probit model is adopted to calculate the probabilities of injury or death caused by fire hazards. This study also investigates the effect of wind speed, gas release rate and the distance between gas pool and platform on fire impacts and casualty probabilities. The present study can support safety measure design to mitigate or avoid the impacts of offshore fire events from subsea gas release.

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Process and chemical industrial areas consist of hundreds and even thousands of installations situated next to each other, where quantities of hazardous (e.g., flammable, explosive, toxic) substances are stored, transported, or processed. These installations are mutually linked in terms of the hazard level they pose to each other in the system. As a result, a primary undesired disruption (e.g., an accidental event, intentional attack, or natural disaster) may escalate to nearby installations, triggering a chain of accidents. This phenomenon is well known as the potential for “knock-on effects” or so-called “domino effects”. This dissertation is devoted to modeling the spatial-temporal evolution of domino effects, preventing the escalation, mitigating the consequences, thereby developing a safer, securer, and more resilient chemical industrial area. @en

The economic issues of risk play an indispensable role in the decision-making process with respect to safety and security management since companies usually face budget limitations. This chapter introduces an economic approach to tackle intentional domino effects in chemical industrial facilities, including threat analysis, vulnerability assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis. The vulnerability assessment, on the basis of threat analysis, addresses the vulnerability of installations directly against intentional attacks as well as the vulnerability of installations exposed to possible domino effects induced by the attacks. Net benefit value, net present value, and disproportion factor are quantified in the cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an integrated protection strategy (a combination of safety and security measures) is profitable, or not. Finally, a cost-effectiveness analysis is developed to achieve the most cost-effective protection strategy within budget constraints.@en

Safety risks have become an obstacle to the sustainability of the chemical industry in China since many chemical companies were forced to close down by China's government in the past three years. This study investigates chemical safety in China in order to identify the causes of the major accidents and accompanying casualties, formulating the safety management needs to develop a sustainable chemical industry in China. First, we analyze the evolution and current status of China's chemical industry to identify possible safety issues rooted in the industry. Second, a thorough accident investigation is conducted based on official statistics and collected chemical accidents in China in the period 2004–2019. Furtherly, the main laws, regulations, guidelines, standards and measures related to chemical safety are analyzed and compared with those in Europe. According to analyses related to the chemical industry, chemical accidents and safety legislation and measures in China and Europe, the current problems with respect to chemical safety in China are discussed systematically. Based on research findings, we propose recommendations for the improvement of chemical safety so as to promote the sustainable development of the chemical industry in China. This study also provides basic data and information for future studies on the safety and sustainability of the chemical industry and major accident prevention in other countries.

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In the chemical industry, multi-hazard (toxic, flammable, and explosive) materials such as acrylonitrile are stored, transported, and processed in large quantities. A release of multi-hazard materials can simultaneously or sequentially lead to acute toxicity, fire and explosion. The spatial-temporal evolution of hazards may also result in cascading effects. In this study, a dynamic methodology called “Dynamic Graph Monte Carlo” (DGMC) is developed to model the evolution of multi-hazard accident scenarios and assess the vulnerability of humans and installations exposed to such hazards. In the DGMC model, chemical plants are modeled as a multi-agent system with three kinds of agents: hazardous installations, ignition sources, and humans while considering the uncertainties and interdependencies among the agents and their impacts on the evolution of hazards and possible escalation effects. A case study is analyzed using the DGMC methodology, demonstrating that the risk can be underestimated if the spatial-temporal evolution of multi-hazard scenarios is neglected. Vapor cloud explosion (VCEs) may lead to more severe damage than fire, and the safety distances which are implemented only based on fire hazards are not sufficient to prevent from the damage of VCEs.

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Vapor cloud explosion (VCE) accidents in recent years such as the Buncefield accident in 2005 indicate that VCEs in process plants may lead to unpredicted overpressures, resulting in catastrophic disasters. Although a lot of attempts have been done to assess VCEs in process plants, little attention has been paid to the spatial-temporal evolution of VCEs. This study, therefore, aims to develop a dynamic methodology based on discrete dynamic event tree to assess the likelihood of VCEs and the vulnerability of installations. The developed methodology consists of six steps: (i) identification of hazardous installations and potential loss of containment (LOC), (ii) analysis of vapor cloud dispersion, (iii) identification and characterization of ignition sources, (iv) explosion frequency and delayed time assessment using the dynamic event tree, (v) overpressure calculation by the Multi-Energy method and (vi) damage assessment based on probit models. This methodology considers the time dependencies in vapor cloud dispersion and in the uncertainty of delayed ignitions. Application of the methodology to a case study shows that the methodology can reflect the characteristics of large VCEs and avoid underestimating the consequences. Besides, this study indicates that ignition control may be regarded as a delay measure, effective emergency actions are needed for preventing VCEs.

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Chemical industrial parks, being critical infrastructures, are susceptible to domino effects triggered by intentional attacks. Previous research on security risk management has mainly focused on using security measures to prevent intentional attacks, neglecting the effects of safety barriers. Safety barriers are able to reduce the potential consequences and decrease the attractiveness of chemical industrial parks to terrorists who aim to maximize the damage. From a systematic perspective, the potential consequence of intentional attacks is defined as the expected loss which is the sum-product of damage probability and consequence of installations. A consequence-based method including a Dynamic Vulnerability Assessment Graph (DVAG) model is proposed to integrate safety and security resources for reducing the risk of intentional attacks. The DVAG model is developed based on dynamic graphs, considering the effects of security measures, safety barriers, and emergency response. This method can assess the consequences and damage probabilities of possible intentional attacks so as to mitigate the risk via evaluation and allocation of security measures and safety barriers with fast computation speed.

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In recent years, the frequent occurrence of bus fire accidents has caused public concern in China, impacting the safe operation of urban transportation seriously. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to evaluate the safety & security (S&S) level of attitude and knowledge in relation to bus fires among residents in Fuzhou city, Fujian Province. 200 passengers from 6 bus terminals and 10 bus stations were selected as study subject. The results show that the S&S attitude and knowledge differ by gender, age, education background, occupation, and the frequency of taking a bus. The educational level significantly influences the S&S attitude and knowledge of the respondents, showing a positive correlation. Similarly, the passengers who take a bus frequently are more likely to display higher S&S attitude and knowledge scores. The participants working in governments and serving as managers in companies scored higher in attitude than the staff and students. A minority of respondents are concerned with bus fire S&S in their daily lives. Many passengers pay not much attention to the safety instructions when taking a bus. Some suggestions are given to improve S&S situation of bus transportation. The research results can lay the foundation for local governments, bus transport operators, and relevant safety organizations to establish a series of safety policies or regulations with respect to bus fires.@en

Past accident analyses indicate that fire escalation is responsible for most of the domino effects that happened in the process industries. The evolution of domino accidents triggered by fire is different from domino accidents triggered by other primary scenarios, since the escalation caused by heat radiation is delayed with respect to the start of the fire. In this study, a methodology involving a Domino Evolution Graph (DEG) model and a Minimum Evolution Time (MET) algorithm is proposed to model the spatial-temporal evolution of domino accidents. Synergistic effects and parallel effects of the spatial evolution, as well as superimposed effects of the temporal evolution possibly occurring in complex domino evolution processes, are considered in this study. A case study demonstrates that the methodology is able to not only capture the spatial-temporal dimension but also to overcome the limitation of the “probit model” w.r.t only able to estimate the damage probability of the first level propagation. Besides, different from simulation or Bayesian approaches, our methodology can quickly provide evolution graphs (paths), the evolution time and the corresponding probability given a primary scenario. Therefore our approach can also be applied to domino risk assessment within an industrial park level and provide support for the allocation decision of safety and security resources.

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Risk assessment has been used extensively as the main approach to prevent accidents in the chemical and process industry. Industrial biotechnology has many of the same hazards as chemical technology, but also encounters biological hazards related to biological agents. Employees in the biotechnology industry are susceptible to health risks because of different types of exposure to harmful agents. The external environment may also be affected by these agents in cases of accidental release. This chapter first presents several traditional risk assessment methods that may be used in industrial biotechnology after comparing differences between industrial biotechnology and chemical technology. Hazard identification in industrial biotechnology is then discussed, for biological as well as traditional hazards. Furthermore, risk assessment of occupational health and safety related to biological hazards is examined using exposure analysis and risk characterization. A two-stage risk assessment method is recommended to assess environmental and ecological risks in industrial biotechnology. Risk analysis of traditional accidents (fire, explosions, and toxic releases) in industrial biotechnology is also described. @en