Interdisciplinary Aspects of Cost-Risk Tradeoffs

The paper focuses on offshore failures and historical cost-risk tradeoffs, including societal and environmental consequences. Cost-benefit analysis has long been used by the Corps of Engineers to design and justify their levee systems. The 9^th-19^th and 21^st-21.2 editions of API RP 2A based their selection of oceanographic criteria on generic cost-risk analysis. Post-Cullen safety cases in the North Sea use such concepts as ALARP and ICAF. We examine the question of how well they hold up when the failure consequences are measured in billions of dollars