Domino Effects in the Process Industries: Modeling, Prevention and Managing

The chemical industry provides most of the necessities for our modern day lives. Due to an ever increasing population and to the associated need for more goods and materials, and due to an increasing requirement for innovation in products and processes, the production of chemicals has known a steep increase during the past decades. Hence, the use, storage, processing, and transportation of hazardous substances is also characterized with an increasing trend. As a result, ever more chemical plants are being built around the world, mostly settled together in integrated industrial parks or in so-called chemical clusters. Thus, a combined increase in activities involving hazardous chemicals and in population densities can be observed on a global scale. This worldwide situation leads to more wealth and easier lives, but also to an increase of potential hazards. Even if the safety scores of the chemical industry are generally high, major accidents, if they would happen, are likely to cause severe consequences in this industrial sector. The concentration of activities within chemical clusters may result in accidents having a simultaneous impact on several plant units, resulting in loss of life, environmental contamination, huge asset damage as well as in important financial consequences and in the disruption of community life by the interruption of lifelines and fuel supplies . Among the most destructive major accidents are those where a “domino effect” takes place, causing the escalation of a primary accident and the propagation of the primary event possibly involving multiple equipment and plant units. The hazard due to “domino effect” is well known and addressed in safety standards and legislation. Catastrophic accidents, as that in Mexico City in 1984 where an entire plant was almost entirely destroyed and more than 500 persons died, led to a high perception of the hazard due to this specific category of accidents. However, models for the assessment of domino effects are demanding due to the complexity of the accident scenario and evolution (simulation of the source term and of the primary scenario, damage of secondary units, consequence assessment of simultaneous primary and secondary scenarios, role of safety barriers, etc.) and due to the high level of detail of the input data required. This is the reason, in combination with the extremely low probabilities of such accidents, that leads often to leave out from the safety assessment of chemical activities, the quantitative assessment and the management of risks due to domino scenarios. Nonetheless, recent events as those related to the 2011 Tōhoku Tsunami in Japan require the safety practitioners to an even more important necessity to explicitly prevent, model and manage the risks due to High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events as domino scenarios. Thus, both the assessment and management of risk due to domino scenarios, and the academic and industrial research on domino effects, are ever more priority topics. A book collecting the available approaches to the modeling, prevention and management of such possible devastating events represented therefore a much needed challenge for the industrial world as well as for the research community worldwide. This volume presents the most state-of-the-art and advanced insights, models, theories, concepts, frameworks, technologies, and methodologies to deal with domino effects and to tackle their prevention, modeling and management in the chemical and process industry. It is intended to become a standard support tool for every professional who has to handle escalating events in process and plant safe design and operation, as well as a reference point stating the state-of-the-art for further research on the topic.