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(Download PDF) Engineering Risk Management 3Rd Edition Meyer T Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Thierry Meyer, Genserik Reniers
Engineering Risk Management
De Gruyter Graduate
Also of Interest
Process Intensification.
Breakthrough in Design, Industrial Innovation Practices,
and Education
Jan Harmsen and Maarten Verkerk,
ISBN ----, e-ISBN ----
Engineering Risk
Management
3rd Edition
Authors
MER Dr Thierry Meyer
Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne
EPFL-SB-ISIC-GSCP
Station 6
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland
thierry.meyer@epfl.ch
ISBN 978-3-11-066531-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066533-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066542-0
www.degruyter.com
About the authors
Thierry Meyer was born in 1961 in Geneva. He obtained his MSc in
Chemical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne (EPFL) in 1985, followed by a PhD in 1989.
He joined Ciba-Geigy Inc. in 1994 as a development chemist in the
pigment division, becoming acting head of development and then
production manager in 1998.
In 1999 he switched to the Institute of Chemical Sciences and
Engineering at EPFL, heading the Polymer Reaction Unit till 2004 and
since then the Chemical and Physical Safety Research Group. He teaches
several courses in the field of industrial and chemical engineering, safety
and risk management at bachelor, master and continuing education level.
From 2005 to 2015, he was also head of occupational safety and health at EPFL for the Faculty
of Basic Sciences and, since 2016, head of the EPFL Safety Competence Centre.
In addition, he is the Swiss academic representative in the working party on Loss Prevention
and Safety Promotion of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110665338-202
Contents
About the authors V
Index 381
1 Risk management is not only a matter
of financial risk
Risk continues to perplex humankind. All societies worldwide, present and past,
face and have faced decisions about how to adequately confront risks. Risk is in-
deed a key issue affecting everyone and everything. How to effectively and effi-
ciently manage risks has been, is, and will always be, a central question for policy
makers, industrialists, academics, and actually for everyone (depending on the spe-
cific risk). This is because the future cannot be predicted; it is uncertain, and no
one has ever been successful in forecasting it. But we are very interested in the fu-
ture, and especially in possible risky decisions and how they will turn out. We all
face all kinds of risks in our everyday life and going about our day-to-day business.
So, would it not make sense to learn how to adequately and swiftly manage risks,
so that the future becomes less obscure?
Answering this question with an engineering perspective is the heart of this
book. If you went to work this morning, you took a risk. If you rode your bicycle,
used public transportation, walked, or drove a car, you took a risk. If you put your
money in a bank, or in stocks, or under a mattress, you took other types of risk. If
you bought a lottery ticket, you were involving an element of chance – something
intimately connected with risk. If you decided to go ahead with one production pro-
cess rather than another, you took a risk. If you decided to write a book, and not
another book or some scientific papers, you took a risk. If you decided to publish
one book, and not another one, you took a risk. All these examples reveal that
“risk” may involve different meanings depending how we look at it.
The current highly competitive nature of economics might encourage firms to
take on more or higher negative risks. But giving up managing such risks would be
financially destructive or even suicidal, even possibly in the short term, because
once disaster has struck it is too late to rewrite history. Some of you might argue
that safety is expensive. We would answer that an accident is even more expensive:
the costs of a major accident are very likely to be huge in comparison with what
should have been invested as prevention.
Let us take, as an example, the human, ecological and financial disaster of the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April 2010. Are the induced costs of several bil-
lions of euros comparable to the investments that could or might have averted the
catastrophe? Answering this question is difficult, a priori, because it would require
assessing these uncertainties and therefore managing a myriad of risks, even the
most improbable. Most decisions related to environment, health and safety are
based on the concept that there exists a low level of residual risk that can be
deemed as “acceptably low.” For this purpose, many companies have established
their own risk acceptance or risk tolerance criteria. However, there exists many dif-
ferent types of risk and many methods of dealing with them, and at present, many
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110665338-001
2 1 Risk management is not only a matter of financial risk
organizations fail to do so. Taking the different types of risk into consideration, the
answer to whether it would have been of benefit to the company to make all neces-
sary risk management investments to prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster would
have been – without any doubt – “yes.”
In 2500 BC, the Chinese had already reduced risks associated with the boat trans-
portation of grain by dividing and distributing their valuable load between six boats
instead of one. The ancient Egyptians (1600 BC) had identified and recognized the
risks involved by the fumes released during the fusion of gold and silver [1]. Hip-
pocrates (460–377 BC), father of modern medicine, had already established links
between respiratory problems of stonemasons and their activity. Since then, the
management of risks has continued to evolve:
– Pliny the Younger (first century AD) described illnesses among slaves.
– In 1472, Dr. Ellenbog of Augsburg wrote an eight-page note on the hazards of
silver, mercury and lead vapors [2].
– Ailments of the lungs found in miners were described extensively in 1556 by
Georg Bauer, writing under the name “Agricola” [3].
– Dating from 1667 and resulting from the great fire that destroyed a part of Lon-
don, the first Fire Insurance Act was published.
Despite today’s steep increase of risk and risk management knowledge and the
never-ending acceleration of all kinds of risk management processes, what still re-
mains to be discovered in risk management and risk engineering is rather systemic
and more complex.
As Ale [4] indicates, the essence of risk was formulated by Arnaud as early as
1662: “Fear of harm ought to be proportional not merely to the gravity of the harm,
but also to the probability of the event.” Hence, the essence of risk lies in the aspect
of probability or uncertainty. Ale further notes that Arnaud treats probability more
as a certainty than an uncertainty and as, in principle, measurable. Frank Knight
even defines risk in 1921 as a “measurable uncertainty” [5]. Today, the word “risk”
is used in everyday speech to describe the probability of loss, either economic or
otherwise, or the likelihood of accidents of some type. It has become a common
word, and is used whether the risk in question is quantifiable or not. In Chapter 2,
we will further elaborate on the true definition and the description of the concept of
“risk” and what constitutes it.
In response to threats to individuals, society and the environment, policy mak-
ers, regulators, industry and others involved in managing and controlling risks
have taken a variety of approaches. Nowadays, the management of risk is a deci-
sion-making process aimed at achieving predetermined goals by reducing the num-
ber of losses of people, equipment and materials caused by accidents possibly
happening while trying to achieve those goals. It is a proactive and reactive approach
to accident and loss reduction. We will discuss risk management and its definition in
a more general way in the next chapters, and we will define risk as having a positive
14 2 Introduction to engineering and managing risks
(Threats)
Negative (Weaknesses) Not archieving
uncertainties objectives
Negative
uncertainty
triangle
Exposure to uncertainties
on the path toward achieving objectives
Positive
uncertainty
triangle
Positive Achieving
uncertainties (Strengths) objectives
(Opportunities) Fig. 2.4: The uncertainty sandglass.
losses.” This triangle can be called the “Safety Risk Trias.” The “Security Risk Trias”
can be seen in an analogous way and consists of “threats (or the intentional misuse
of hazards) – vulnerability to threats – intentional losses.”
If one of these elements is removed from one of these triangles (“trias” in
Latin), there is no safety/security risk. The engineering aspects of RM, discussed in
this book, focus on how to omit, diminish, decrease or soften as much as possible
one (or a combination) of the three elements of the “Safety/Security Risk Trias”
(hazards, exposure or losses), or a combination thereof.
Roughly, three types of uncertainties can be identified:
– Type I – uncertainties where a lot of historical data is available.
– Type II – uncertainties where little or very little historical data is available.
– Type III – uncertainties where no historical data is available.
From the viewpoint of negative risks, consequences of type I uncertainties mainly re-
late to individual employees (e.g., most work-related accidents). The outcome of type
II uncertainties may affect a company or large parts thereof, e.g., large explosions
and internal domino effects – for this sort of accident the reader is referred to Lees
[12], Wells [13], Kletz [14, 15], Atherton and Gil [16] and Reniers [17]. Type III uncer-
tainties have unprecedented and unseen impacts upon the organization and society.
Thus, whereas type I negative risks lead to most work-related accidents, such
as falling, little fires, slipping, etc., type II negative risks can result in catastrophes
with major consequences and often with multiple fatalities. Type II accidents do
occur on a (semi-)regular basis from a worldwide perspective, and large fires, large
releases, explosions, toxic clouds, etc. belong to this class of accident. Type III neg-
ative risks may transpire into “true disasters” in terms of the loss of lives and/or
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"Perigordissa?"
"Niinpä kyllä."
"Niin."
*****
Hän luuli olevansa yksinään. Mutta kaiken aikaa makasi
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hänen jokaista liikettään ja kuunnellen hänen hengitystään —
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*****
Hän jäi siihen asentoon noin minuutiksi. Sitte hän kääntyi ja hiipi
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Kiinnytysjauhe.
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Hän oli kääntynyt pois taivaasta — valkeakasvoinen, riutuva nainen,
melkein vielä tyttönen — ja hän oli täällä.
Mutta onni oli heitä vastaan, tai tavoittajan katse oli harvinaisen
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