Resumen de Contributions to the risk assessment of major accidents in port areas
Andrea Ronza
This thesis is structured as a series of papers, all but one already published in international journals, preceded by a series of introductive sections. 1. Introduction. Port areas are described as related to risk assessment, handling of hazardous materials, accidents, relevant regulations and international conventions, and security. 2. Bibliographic survey. References are collected above all on port-HazMat topics, i.e. oil spills and risk assessment of port accidents, touching various risk assessment techniques. 3. Objectives, methodology and main results. This chapter defines the objectives of the research, i.e. to analyse port systems from the point of view of risk assessment of HazMat handling and to design proper risk assessment tools. Moreover, it lists the methodology followed and the major results obtained for each of the papers included in the thesis. 4. Conclusions. Papers: Paper 1 - A Survey of Accidents in Ports (Loss Prevention Bulletin, 183, pp. 23-28, 2005). A historical analysis of 1,000+ port accidents was carried out allowing for various aspects (type and cause of accidents, consequences on people, etc.). The relative importance of diverse types of accidents was studied. Paper 2 - Predicting the Frequency of Accidents in Port Areas by Developing Event Trees from Historical Analysis (Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 16, pp. 551-560, 2003). Historical analysis of a sample of port accidents similar to that of Paper 1 was used to identify accident sequences, i.e. general port accident scenario event trees. The frequency of some typical port accidents was then determined, showing that the event trees proposed can be used in QRA. Paper 3 - Using Transportation Accident Databases to Investigate Ignition and Explosion Probabilities of Flammable Spills (Journal of Hazardous Materials, 146(3), pp. 106-123, 2007). Literature analysis of ignition and explosion probability data is performed. The results of a scrutiny of some tens of thousa
