Probabilistic Environmental Risk of Hazardous Materials
- 1 November 1992
- journal article
- Published by American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in Journal of Environmental Engineering
- Vol. 118 (6), 878-889
- https://doi.org/10.1061/(asce)0733-9372(1992)118:6(878)
Abstract
To help quantify the potential devastation of an environmental accident involving hazardous materials, local, state, and federal agencies have turned to risk assessment methodologies. Risk is commonly defined as the expected cost or monetary loss of an environmental accident and is based on the probability of the accident. This definition of risk is clearly evidenced by the media coverage of environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the potential risk surrounding nuclear power plants. However, environmental risk should reflect the probability that an environmental system, or component of that system, can recover from an environmental accident. Environmental risk should address issues such as the interaction between our development and the impact on the environmental system being considered. This paper presents one possible model for determining the probability that an environmental system is able to recover from changes resulting from accidental ecosystem perturbations. A second moment approach commonly applied in reliability analysis is used to quantify the probability that the environmental system will fail due to the introduction of incompatible human activities.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- Health risk assessment of biodegradable volatile organic chemicals: A case study of PCE, TCE, DCE and VCJournal of Hazardous Materials, 1991
- An Integrated Network/Planar Multiobjective Model for Routing and Siting for Hazardous Materials and WastesTransportation Science, 1991
- An Expeditious Risk Assessment of the Highway Transportation of Flammable Liquids in BulkTransportation Science, 1991
- The toxic spill index (emergency response index)Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Part A, 1990
- Multi‐Objective Programming Approach for Routing Hazardous MaterialsJournal of Transportation Engineering, 1989
- Critical Issues in Safe Transport of Hazardous MaterialsJournal of Transportation Engineering, 1989
- Developing a risk/cost framework for routing truck movements of hazardous materialsAccident Analysis & Prevention, 1988
- Environmental EngineeringPublished by Elsevier ,1988
- Effect of aluminium speciation on fish in dilute acidified watersNature, 1980