A decision-making framework for protecting process plants from flooding based on fault tree analysis

The protection of process plants from external events is mandatory in the Seveso Directive. Among these events figures the possibility of inundation of a plant, which may cause a hazard by disabling technical components and obviating operator interventions. A methodological framework for dealing with hazards from potential flooding events is presented. It combines an extension of the fault tree method with generic properties of flooding events in rivers and of dikes, which should be adapted to site-specific characteristics in a concrete case. Thus, a rational basis for deciding whether upgrading is required or not and which of the components should be upgraded is provided. Both the deterministic and the probabilistic approaches are compared. Preference is given to the probabilistic one. The conclusions drawn naturally depend on the scope and detail of the model calculations and the decision criterion adopted. The latter has to be supplied from outside the analysis, e.g. by the analyst himself, the plant operator or the competent authority. It turns out that decision-making is only viable if the boundary conditions for both the procedure of analysis and the decision criterion are clear.