(38b) Building Design Requirements – Utilizing Your Facility Siting Study Effectively

With the imminent release of updates to the API’s Recommended Practices 752 and 753 (API RP 752/753), it is the appropriate time to examine two guiding principles that facility owners and operators should consider for implementing facility siting recommendations for occupied buildings.

The first, and most important, guiding principle is “The Golden Rule” — whenever possible, locate your personnel in buildings away from hazardous areas. However, this is not always possible. Some facilities include processes that require operators to be located near the units they are responsible for, while others may not have the real estate to expand beyond their existing footprint. The second guiding principle is that occupied buildings should be designed to protect workers from hazards associated with the facility, which could include explosion, fire and toxic material releases. When reviewing facility siting results and implementing recommendations, these two principles should drive decision making.

Blast-resistant buildings have traditionally been quantified by the ability to resist blast loads for a prescribed level of structural damage. Focus has therefore been placed on the structural performance without fully correlating this to occupant vulnerability. Fire and toxic material hazards and their impact on building occupants is often overlooked, resulting in buildings that do not comply with the full intent of API RP 752/753. The definition of occupant vulnerability, per API RP 752/753, is the “portion of occupants that could potentially experience a life-threatening injury or fatality if a potential event were to occur.” As summarized in the third edition of API RP 752, “owners/operators should understand the basis for the correlation between building damage and occupant vulnerability and assess its applicability.” Why does this matter?

This paper will utilize full scale tests of modular building structures to demonstrate why occupant vulnerability matters – not just building response to blast, fragments, fire, and toxic impacts. This paper will also draw on occupied building siting results from a case study petrochemical facility to discuss where to locate buildings based on demonstrated occupant vulnerability to facility hazards. Armed with information on how building structures respond to hazards as well as where to locate different types of protective buildings based on facility siting study results, you will have the information you need to reduce your onsite risk profile for existing facilities by implementing results from your facility siting study.