(8c) Comparing Apples and Oranges: Creating a Comprehensive View of Facility Siting Risks

Ensuring that building occupants are kept safe from the myriad hazards present in many process facilities involves a range of challenges. Often, an operating area’s facility siting plan is the result of several disparate studies, conducted over a period of years/decades, that are stitched together to try to form an overall plan. As a result, it may be difficult to find a complete representation of potential impacts on a particular building, or to gauge how changes to operations may impact nearby buildings and their occupants. An accurate understanding of all potential impacts is also critical for evaluating and making large investment decisions for process safety mitigations to facility siting risks.

Many of these challenges can be addressed by creating a single map of the site, using a high resolution satellite image embedded into a CAD file. By utilizing the layering capabilities of the CAD program, contours from individual scenarios can be drawn on individual layers to be viewed individually or used together to create an overall map to enable siting of occupied facilities more easily. By having each hazard type drawn on a single map, the user can quickly evaluate the hazards that impact a particular area and whether a particular hazard is dominant. This can help with a variety of facility siting decisions including where to site buildings, whether or not a building occupancy can be increased, evaluation of efficacy of risk mitigation measures, and to improve the effectiveness of emergency response efforts.