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As with any process safety study, hazard identification is a crucial step. It is of critical importance to ensure that all potential hazards are identified and considered.

Read this newsletter by Georges Melhem, Ph.D., FAIChE, and Neil Prophet on safeguarding your buildings from exposure to fire and toxic material release by enhancing your facility siting. Included are recent changes to API facility siting practices, and facility siting lessons learned.

Topics include:

• 2004 Rupture and Ignition of a Gas Pipeline
• 2012 Natural Gas Facility Explosion and Fire
• Updates to API Facility Siting Practices
• Protection Concepts for Buildings Exposed to Fire
• Protection Concepts for Buildings Exposed to Toxic Material Release
• Process Safety Management Tools

Building risk evaluation methodologies that are too conservative can lead to excessive mitigation costs without achieving the intended risk reduction. Building risk evaluation methodologies that are inadequate can leave companies exposed to high levels of risk for their portfolio of buildings.

Ultimately, facility siting is about risk reduction to occupants, infrastructure and physical assets, company reputation, and business interruption. Disciplined risk reduction requires a company to allocate resources and capital where portfolio risk is driven as low as reasonably practical and where the most risk reduction is achieved per resource and capital allocation.

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