Petroleum and Hazardous Material Releases from Industrial Facilities Associated with Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina struck an area dense with industry, causing numerous releases of petroleum and hazardous materials. This study integrates information from a number of sources to describe the frequency, causes, and effects of these releases in order to inform analysis of risk from future hurricanes. Over 200 onshore releases of hazardous chemicals, petroleum, or natural gas were reported. Storm surge was responsible for the majority of petroleum releases and failure of storage tanks was the most common mechanism of release. Of the smaller number of hazardous chemical releases reported, many were associated with flaring from plant startup, shutdown, or process upset. In areas impacted by storm surge, 10% of the facilities within the Risk Management Plan (RMP) and Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) databases and 28% of SIC 1311 facilities experienced accidental releases. In areas subject only to hurricane strength winds, a lower fraction (1% of RMP and TRI and 10% of SIC 1311 facilities) experienced a release while 1% of all facility types reported a release in areas that experienced tropical storm strength winds. Of industrial facilities surveyed, more experienced indirect disruptions such as displacement of workers, loss of electricity and communication systems, and difficulty acquiring supplies and contractors for operations or reconstruction (55%), than experienced releases. To reduce the risk of hazardous material releases and speed the return to normal operations under these difficult conditions, greater attention should be devoted to risk‐based facility design and improved prevention and response planning.     

Can Environmental Insurance Succeed Where Other Strategies Fail? The Case of Underground Storage Tanks

Private risk reduction will be socially efficient only when firms are liable for all the damage that they cause. We find that environmental insurance can achieve social efficiency even when two traditional policy instruments—ex post fines and risk management mandates with ex ante fines—do not. Inefficiency occurs with ex post fines, when small firms declare bankruptcy and escape their liabilities, limiting the incentives from this policy tool. Firms ignore mandates to implement efficient risk management because regulatory agencies do not have sufficient resources to monitor every firm. The evolution of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's and states’ underground storage tank programs suggests that mandating environmental insurance can address inefficiency due to small firms declaring bankruptcy. Comparing insurance mandates to risk management mandates, the burden on a regulator is lower if all it has to do is to confirm that the firm has insurance rather than that the firm has actually, and effectively, implemented required management practices. For underground storage tanks, we show that insurance lowered toxic releases.     

Fair Processes for Societal Decisions Involving Distributional Inequalities

We investigate fair processes for societal decisions that involve different risks and benefits to different groups. A fair decision-making process is particularly important for decisions such as siting hazardous facilities. We experimentally evaluate the impact of alternative decision processes on the final choice of hypothetical facility sites and the resulting benefit and risk distribution to groups. The experimental task required choice among many alternative sites for a hazardous facility. Sites differ by the distribution of risks and benefits to each of two communities, and in the attractiveness of the sites to each community. Subjects were divided into three groups: individuals who judged the best site in the role of arbitrators, pairs of negotiators with one person representing each of the two communities, and trios who identified the best site in the role of a siting jury. We found the choices of negotiating and siting jury groups tended to emphasize the communities'preferences compared to the individual arbitrators who tended to focus on balancing the distribution of risks and benefits. Also, undergraduate psychology students, regardless of the dispute resolution mechanism, tended to display more emphasis on the risks and benefits, and graduate business students tended to focus more on the communities'preferences.     

Characterization of Historical Methane Occurrence Frequencies from U.S. Underground Natural Gas Storage Facilities with Implications for Risk Management,Operations, and Regulatory Policy

Defining a baseline for the frequency of occurrences at underground natural gas storage facilities is critical to maintaining safe operation and to the development of appropriate risk management plans and regulatory approaches. Currently used frequency-estimation methods are reviewed and broadened in this article to include critical factors of cause, severity, and uncertainty that contribute to risk. A Bayesian probabilistic analysis characterizes the aleatoric historical occurrence frequencies given imperfect sampling. Frequencies for the three main storage facility types in the United States (depleted oil-and-gas field storage, aquifer storage, solution-mined salt cavern storage) are generally on the order of 3 to 9 × 10^–2 occurrences, of all causes (surface, well integrity, subsurface integrity) and severities (nuisance, serious, catastrophic), per facility-year. Loss of well integrity is associated with many, but not all, occurrences either within the subsurface or from there up to the surface. The probability of one serious or catastrophic leakage occurrence to the ground surface within the next 10 years, assuming constant number of facilities, is approximately 0.1–0.3% for any facility type. Storage operators and industry regulators can use occurrence frequencies, their associated probabilities and uncertainties, and forecasts of severity magnitudes to better prioritize resources, establish a baseline against which progress toward achieving a reduction target could be measured, and develop more effective mitigation/monitoring/reduction programs in a risk management plan.     

“Not in (or Under) My Backyard”: Geographic Proximity and Public Acceptance of Carbon Capture and Storage Facilities

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an innovative technical approach to mitigate the problem of climate change by capturing carbon dioxide emissions and injecting them underground for permanent geological storage. CCS has been perceived both positively, as an innovative approach to facilitate a more environmentally benign use of fossil fuels while also generating local economic benefits, and negatively, as a technology that prolongs the use of carbon‐intensive energy sources and burdens local communities with prohibitive costs and ecological and human health risks. This article extends existing research on the “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) phenomenon in a direction that explores the public acceptance of CCS. We utilize survey data collected from 1,001 residents of the coal‐intensive U.S. state of Indiana. Over 80% of respondents express support for the general use of CCS technology. However, 20% of these initial supporters exhibit a NIMBY‐like reaction and switch to opposition as a CCS facility is proposed close to their communities. Respondents’ worldviews, their beliefs about the local economic benefits that CCS will generate, and their concerns about its safety have the greatest impact on increasing or decreasing the acceptance of nearby facilities. These results lend valuable insights into the perceived risks associated with CCS technology and the possibilities for its public acceptance at both a national and local scale. They may be extended further to provide initial insights into likely public reactions to other technologies that share a similar underground dimension, such as hydraulic fracturing.     

Extending the Quantitative Assessment of Industrial Risks to Earthquake Effects

In the general framework of quantitative methods for natural‐technological (NaTech) risk analysis, a specific methodology was developed for assessing risks caused by hazardous substances released due to earthquakes. The contribution of accidental scenarios initiated by seismic events to the overall industrial risk was assessed in three case studies derived from the actual plant layout of existing oil refineries. Several specific vulnerability models for different equipment classes were compared and assessed. The effect of differing structural resistances for process equipment on the final risk results was also investigated. The main factors influencing the final risk values resulted from the models for equipment vulnerability and the assumptions for the reference damage states of the process equipment. The analysis of case studies showed that in seismic zones the additional risk deriving from damage caused by earthquakes may be up to more than one order of magnitude higher than that associated to internal failure causes. Critical equipment was determined to be mainly pressurized tanks, even though atmospheric tanks were more vulnerable to containment loss. Failure of minor process equipment having a limited hold‐up of hazardous substances (such as pumps) was shown to have limited influence on the final values of the risk increase caused by earthquakes.     

Containment of Polioviruses After Eradication and OPV Cessation: Characterizing Risks to Improve Management

The goal of the World Health Organization is to stop routine use of oral poliovirus vaccine shortly after interruption of wild poliovirus transmission. A key component of this goal is to minimize the risk of reintroduction by destruction of polioviruses except in an absolute minimum number of facilities that serve essential functions and implement effective containment. Effective containment begins with a complete facility risk assessment. This article focuses on characterizing the risks of exposure to polioviruses from the essential vaccine production, quality control, and international reference and research facilities that remain. We consider the potential exposure pathways that might lead to a poliovirus reintroduction, including para-occupational exposures and releases to the environment, and review the literature to provide available estimates and a qualitative assessment of containment risks. Minimizing the risk of poliovirus transmission from a poliovirus facility to increasingly susceptible communities is a crucial and ongoing effort requiring understanding and actively managing the potential exposure pathways.     

Carcinogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: An Analysis of Screening Values,Guidelines, and Standards in the Northeast

Risk‐based, background, and laboratory quantitation limit‐derived standards for carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (cPAHs) in residential and nonresidential soils vary across the northeast region of the United States. The magnitude and extent of this variation, however, have not been systematically studied. This article examines the technical basis and methodology used by eight northeastern states in the development of risk‐based screening values, guidelines, and standards for cPAHs in soils. Exposure pathways, human receptors, algorithms, and input variables used by each state in the calculation of acceptable human health risks are identified and reviewed within the context of environmental policy and regulatory impacts. Emphasis is placed on a comparative analysis of multipathway exposures (incidental ingestion, dermal contact, and particulate inhalation) and key science‐policy decisions that have led to the promulgation and adoption of different exposure criteria for cPAHs in the Northeast. More than 425 data points and 20 distinct exposure factors across eight state programs, 18 age subgroups, six activity scenarios, and three exposure pathways were systematically evaluated. Risk‐based values for one state varied either above or below risk‐based, background or laboratory quantitation limit‐derived standards of another state for the same cPAH and receptor. Standards for cPAHs in soils were found to differ significantly across the northeast region—in some cases, by one or two orders of magnitude. While interstate differences can be expected to persist, future changes in federal guidance could mean a shift in risk drivers, compliance status, or calculated cumulative risks for individual properties impacted by PAH releases.     

Safe and Sorry: Risk, Environmental Equity, and Hazardous Waste Management Facilities

Many empirical environmental equity analyses have attempted to determine if hazardous waste treatment, storage, or disposal facilities (TSDFs) are in disproportionately minority or low-income areas. These prior analyses did not explain the extent of the risks posed by TSDFs, nor did they weight the distribution of those risks by the individual characteristics of the TSDFs. This study evaluated the risks posed by TSDFs in general and then examined whether any such risks were distributed inequitably when each TSDF was weighted by the amount of hazardous waste that it managed. Based on an assessment of the nature of the hazardous wastes that TSDFs manage, the possible exposure paths to risk from TSDFs, the laws designed to minimize the risks that TSDFs pose, and TSDFs' safety records, the attention devoted to TSDFs by environmental equity researchers is greatly exaggerated. Furthermore, based on this study's analyses, there was no pattern of the TSDFs or the risks that they posed being inequitably concentrated in disproportionately minority or low-income areas. Most of the TSDFs and the hazardous waste that they manage are in areas that are either unpopulated or have fewer minority or low-income people than the national average. There are, however, some TSDFs that are in highly populated, heavily minority or low-income areas, which results in such people being more likely overall to be in close proximity to these facilities.     

Early Warning Indicators for Challenges in Underground Coal Storage

Early warning or leading indicators are discussed for unexpected incidences in case of large‐scale underground coal storage at a power plant. The experience is compared with above‐ground stockpiles for which established procedures are available but where access for prevention and mitigation are much easier. It is suggested that while the explicit organization, procedures, and the general safety systems aim to provide the targeted levels of performance for the storage, representing new technology without much precedence elsewhere in the world, the extensive experience and tacit knowledge from above‐ground open and closed storage systems can help to prepare for and to prevent unwanted incidents in the underground storage. This kind of experience has been also found useful for developing the leading or early warning indicators for underground storage. Examples are given on observed autoignition and freezing of coal in the storage silos, and on occupational hazards. Selection of the leading indicators needs to consider the specific features of the unique underground facility.     

Identifying Dangerous Trucking Firms

The paper develops a statistical procedure for predicting the safety performance of motor carriers based on characteristics of firms and results of two government safety enforcement programs. One program is an audit of management safety practices, and the other is a program to inspect drivers and vehicles at the roadside for compliance with safety regulations. The technique can be used to provide safety regulators with an empirical approach to identify the most dangerous firms and provide a priority list of firms against which educational and enforcement actions should be initiated. The government needs to use such an approach rather than directly observing accident rates because the most dangerous firms are generally small and, despite relatively high accident rates, accidents remain rare events. The technique uses negative-binomial regression procedures on a dataset of 20,000 firms. The definition of poor performance in roadside inspection is based on both the rate of inspections per fleet mile and the average number of violations found during an inspection. This choice was made because selection for inspection has both a random and nonrandom component. The results of the study suggest that both of the government's safety programs help identify the most dangerous firms. The 2.5% of firms that do poorly in both programs have an average accident rate twice that of the mean for all other firms.     

Social Optimal Location of Facilities with Fixed Servers,Stochastic Demand,and Congestion

We consider two capacity choice scenarios for the optimal location of facilities with fixed servers, stochastic demand, and congestion. Motivating applications include virtual call centers, consisting of geographically dispersed centers, walk‐in health clinics, motor vehicle inspection stations, automobile emissions testing stations, and internal service systems. The choice of locations for such facilities influences both the travel cost and waiting times of users. In contrast to most previous research, we explicitly embed both customer travel/connection and delay costs in the objective function and solve the location–allocation problem and choose facility capacities simultaneously. The choice of capacity for a facility that is viewed as a queueing system with Poisson arrivals and exponential service times could mean choosing a service rate for the servers (Scenario 1) or choosing the number of servers (Scenario 2). We express the optimal service rate in closed form in Scenario 1 and the (asymptotically) optimal number of servers in closed form in Scenario 2. This allows us to eliminate both the number of servers and the service rates from the optimization problems, leading to tractable mixed‐integer nonlinear programs. Our computational results show that both problems can be solved efficiently using a Lagrangian relaxation optimization procedure.     

Public Perceptions of Regulatory Costs,Their Uncertainty and Interindividual Distribution

Public perceptions of both risks and regulatory costs shape rational regulatory choices. Despite decades of risk perception studies, this article is the first on regulatory cost perceptions. A survey of 744 U.S. residents probed: (1) How knowledgeable are laypeople about regulatory costs incurred to reduce risks? (2) Do laypeople see official estimates of cost and benefit (lives saved) as accurate? (3) (How) do preferences for hypothetical regulations change when mean‐preserving spreads of uncertainty replace certain cost or benefit? and (4) (How) do preferences change when unequal interindividual distributions of hypothetical regulatory costs replace equal distributions? Respondents overestimated costs of regulatory compliance, while assuming agencies underestimate costs. Most assumed agency estimates of benefits are accurate; a third believed both cost and benefit estimates are accurate. Cost and benefit estimates presented without uncertainty were slightly preferred to those surrounded by “narrow uncertainty” (a range of costs or lives entirely within a personally‐calibrated zone without clear acceptance or rejection of tradeoffs). Certain estimates were more preferred than “wide uncertainty” (a range of agency estimates extending beyond these personal bounds, thus posing a gamble between favored and unacceptable tradeoffs), particularly for costs as opposed to benefits (but even for costs a quarter of respondents preferred wide uncertainty to certainty). Agency‐acknowledged uncertainty in general elicited mixed judgments of honesty and trustworthiness. People preferred egalitarian distributions of regulatory costs, despite skewed actual cost distributions, and preferred progressive cost distributions (the rich pay a greater than proportional share) to regressive ones. Efficient and socially responsive regulations require disclosure of much more information about regulatory costs and risks.     

Increasing the Revenue of Self‐Storage Warehouses by Facility Design

Self‐storage is a booming industry. Both private customers and companies can rent temporary space from such facilities. The design of self‐storage warehouses differs from other facility designs in its focus on revenue maximization. A major question is how to design self‐storage facilities to fit market segments and accommodate volatile demand to maximize revenue. Customers that cannot be accommodated with a space size of their choice can be either rejected or upscaled to a larger space. Based on data of 54 warehouses in America, Europe, and Asia, we propose a new facility design approach with models for three different cases: an overflow customer rejection model and two models with customer upscale possibilities, one with reservation and another without reservation. We solve the models for several real warehouse cases, and our results show that the existing self‐storage warehouses can be redesigned to generate larger revenues for all cases. Finally, we show that the upscaling policy without reservation generally outperforms the upscaling policy with reservation.     

Risk,Media, and Stigma at Rocky Flats

Public responses to nuclear technologies are often strongly negative. Events, such as accidents or evidence of unsafe conditions at nuclear facilities, receive extensive and dramatic coverage by the news media. These news stories affect public perceptions of nuclear risks and the geographic areas near nuclear facilities. One result of these perceptions, avoidance behavior, is a form of "technological stigma" that leads to losses in property values near nuclear facilities. The social amplification of risk is a conceptual framework that attempts to explain how stigma is created through media transmission of information about hazardous places and public perceptions and decisions. This paper examines stigma associated with the U.S. Department of Energy's Rocky Flats facility, a major production plant in the nation's nuclear weapons complex, located near Denver, Colorado. This study, based upon newspaper analyses and a survey of Denver area residents, finds that the social amplification theory provides a reasonable framework for understanding the events and public responses that took place in regard to Rocky Flats during a 6-year period, beginning with an FBI raid of the facility in 1989.     

Perceived Risk, Stigma, and Potential Economic Impacts of a High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada

This study investigates the potential impacts of the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, upon tourism, retirement and job-related migration, and business development in Las Vegas and the state. Adverse impacts may be expected to result from perceptions of risk, stigmatization, and socially amplified reactions to "unfortunate events" associated with the repository (major and minor accidents, discoveries of radiation releases, evidence of mismanagement, attempts to sabotage or disrupt the facility, etc.). The conceptual underpinnings of risk perception, stigmatization, and social amplification are discussed and empirical data are presented to demonstrate how nuclear images associated with Las Vegas and the State of Nevada might trigger adverse economic effects. The possibility that intense negative imagery associated with the repository may cause significant harm to Nevada's economy can no longer be ignored by serious attempts to assess the risks and impacts of this unique facility. The behavioral processes described here appear relevant as well to the social impact assessment of any proposed facility that produces, uses, transports, or disposes of hazardous materials.     

Incentives Policies to Site Hazardous Waste Facilities

This paper addresses the use of mitigation and compensation as incentives policies to stimulate agreement between parties interested in siting a hazardous waste facility and potential host communities. We develop a model of facility siting that distinguishes five key factors which influence the acceptability of a proposed facility when considered in relation to status quo conditions. This model then is used to examine the effectiveness of different incentives policies with regard to (a) mitigating the perceived risks and (b) compensating the adverse impacts of a hazardous waste facility.     

Empirical Estimation of the Conditional Probability of Natech Events Within the United States

Natural disasters are the cause of a sizeable number of hazmat releases, referred to as “natechs.” An enhanced understanding of natech probability, allowing for predictions of natech occurrence, is an important step in determining how industry and government should mitigate natech risk. This study quantifies the conditional probabilities of natechs at TRI/RMP and SICS 1311 facilities given the occurrence of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods. During hurricanes, a higher probability of releases was observed due to storm surge (7.3 releases per 100 TRI/RMP facilities exposed vs. 6.2 for SIC 1311) compared to category 1–2 hurricane winds (5.6 TRI, 2.6 SIC 1311). Logistic regression confirms the statistical significance of the greater propensity for releases at RMP/TRI facilities, and during some hurricanes, when controlling for hazard zone. The probability of natechs at TRI/RMP facilities during earthquakes increased from 0.1 releases per 100 facilities at MMI V to 21.4 at MMI IX. The probability of a natech at TRI/RMP facilities within 25 miles of a tornado was small (～0.025 per 100 facilities), reflecting the limited area directly affected by tornadoes. Areas inundated during flood events had a probability of 1.1 releases per 100 facilities but demonstrated widely varying natech occurrence during individual events, indicating that factors not quantified in this study such as flood depth and speed are important for predicting flood natechs. These results can inform natech risk analysis, aid government agencies responsible for planning response and remediation after natural disasters, and should be useful in raising awareness of natech risk within industry.     

Perceived Risks of Radioactive Waste Transport Through Oregon: Results of a Statewide Survey

Transportation of hazardous materials, and particularly radioactive wastes, on public highways has become an important risk management issue. The unfavorability of public attitudes regarding hazardous and nuclear wastes signals the potential for strong public opposition to programs for transporting these materials. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted to assess public reactions to a long-term nuclear waste transport program planned to follow a route through a portion of rural Oregon. The survey assessed a number of key risk perception issues, including perceived health and safety risks of nuclear waste transport, relative risks of transport vs. storage at an existing site, trust in state officials, and satisfaction with life in communities along the transport route. The survey identified a number of attitudes and concerns that need to be understood and considered by those in charge of designing and implementing the waste-transportation program.     

Risk-Based Integrity and Inspection Modeling (RBIIM) of Process Components/System

Process plants deal with hazardous (highly flammable and toxic) chemicals at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. Proper inspection and maintenance of these facilities is paramount for the maintenance of safe and continuous operation. This article proposes a risk-based methodology for integrity and inspection modeling (RBIIM) to ensure safe and fault-free operation of the facility. This methodology uses a gamma distribution to model the material degradation and a Bayesian updating method to improve the distribution based on actual inspection results. The method deals with the two cases of perfect and imperfect inspections. The measurement error resulting from imperfect inspections is modeled as a zero-mean, normally distributed random process. The risk is calculated using the probability of failure and the consequence is assessed in terms of cost as a function of time. The risk function is used to determine an optimal inspection and replacement interval. The calculated inspection and replacement interval is subsequently used in the design of an integrity inspection plan. Two case studies are presented: the maintenance of an autoclave and the maintenance of a pipeline segment. For the autoclave, the interval between two successive inspections is found to be 19 years. For the pipeline, the next inspection is due after 5 years from now. Measurements taken at inspections are used in estimating a new degradation rate that can then be used to update the failure distribution function.