TRANSPORTATION RISK MANAGEMENT: A NEW PARADIGM

Abstract

Over the past decade, risk management has been evolving into a core business practice in government and industry. In the transportation sector, the overarching risk management objective has been to reduce accident likelihood and severity. Where hazardous materials shipments are involved, this extends to spill prevention and mitigating the consequences when a release occurs. Until recently, the approach to transportation risk management assumed that when manmade disasters occurred, they were accidental in nature and not due to malicious intent. Terrorist activities, culminating with the tragic events of September 11, 2001, have dramatically changed this landscape. In particular, we have learned that assessment of transportation risk must be performed with a more expanded scope to accommodate terrorism scenarios that heretofore would have been considered so unlikely that they did not warrant risk management attention. Similarly, emergency responders must be able to handle impacts far beyond what was previously imaginable in terms of number of victims, deployment of response resources and agency coordination. Given these circumstances, it is apparent that decision-makers need to employ a new paradigm for transportation risk management. In particular, this paradigm must: 1) more explicitly consider security threat and vulnerability, and 2) integrate security considerations into the overall framework for addressing natural and man-made disasters, be they accidental or planned. This paper introduces this paradigm and recommends actions that will enable security considerations to become an integral part of transportation risk management.

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