Seismic early warning systems: Some insights for the process industry

Industrial facilities and in particular chemical, petrochemical and oil processing industries located in seismic areas may trigger relevant accidents resulting in release of hazardous materials (fires, explosions), injuring people and increasing the overall damage to nearby area, either directly or through cascade effects ("domino effects"). As a consequence, Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) of industrial facilities has to take properly account of multiple hazards threatening critical equipments and of countermeasures and protection systems. The latter can be activated based on information obtained from monitoring systems or external hazard detection devices. If hazardous event like earthquakes are concerned, Early Warning System represent an interesting option for protection of critical industrial facilities, as a consequence, some insights for the process industry are discussed in the present paper. The aim is to analyze the main aspects related to management of large amounts of hazardous substances as well as to protection against failures and faults generated by seismic base excitations. Relations between structural monitoring, seismic reliability of equipments and industrial quantitative risk analyses will be analysed; critical issues will be discussed from an interdisciplinary standpoint in order to exploit the potentialities and define even limitations of the approach. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group.