A multi-plant emergency response plan for tackling major fire accidents in chemical clusters

Abstract

In chemical industrial areas, the so-called chemical clusters, there are many dangerous chemical process units and storage equipment. Major fire accidents in the chemical clusters may cause huge losses due to domino effects happening outside the boundaries of one chemical plant. Therefore, managing these multi-plant crisis situations are essential to contain and control the fire, to safeguard employees and anyone nearby who might be affected and to minimize damage to property or the environment. However, multi-plant emergency response planning is not identical to that of a single company. In 2013, Reniers & Faes (Reniers & Faes, 2013) proposed an emergency planning approach at chemical cluster level. Accordingly, this paper aims to present a multi-plant emergency planning tool in case of major fire accidents so that the emergency levels and respective response actions at individual companies within the cluster can be identified.