Quantitative risk assessment of Natech scenarios triggered by earthquakes involving pipelines

Abstract

Earthquakes may cause severe damage to the technological infrastructure and to transport systems handling hazardous substances as oil, natural gas and flammable/toxic chemicals. Earthquake damage may trigger Natech scenarios involving the release of hazardous substances, resulting in major accidents including fires, explosions, and toxic releases. Most of the methodologies developed for the quantitative assessment of risk related to Natech scenarios only focus on stationary installations handling hazardous substances, as chemical and process plants. However, pipelines are widely used for the long-range bulk transport of hazardous materials. In the present study an innovative methodology was developed to address the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of Natech scenarios triggered by earthquakes involving pipelines handling hazardous substances. Specific vulnerability models are used to assess pipeline failure probability. A new specific procedure was developed to carry out the calculation of consequences and risk along the main dimension of the pipeline. The innovative methodology developed allows for the first time the calculation of local specific individual risk and societal risk due to Natech events along the route of the pipeline. Two different case studies are discussed to provide a notional application of the proposed methodology and to demonstrate the applicability of the approach to a real-scale pipeline risk assessment problem. The results obtained from the case studies show the relevance of risk due to Natech scenarios involving pipelines with respect to that deriving from possible conventional failures, as well as the potentialities of the proposed approach in considering different intensities of seismic hazard along the route of the pipeline. Thus, the methodology developed provides an important support to risk-informed decision making in the management and mitigation of major accidents involving pipelines.

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