Application of a quantitative risk assessment method to emergency response planning

Transportation-related hazardous materials releases pose obvious hazards to the general public and response personnel. Statistical risk assessment techniques are valuable in quantifying these hazards and evaluating methods to reduce the risk. In this paper, we describe a quantitative risk assessment approach for hazardous materials transportation that has a strong emphasis on consequence modeling and employs considerable statistical data from past incidents. We illustrate application of this method to evaluating distances to which the public should be protected immediately following an accidental release of toxic materials that pose an inhalation hazard. While this paper focuses on emergency response aspects of the problem, the framework we describe has applications to societal risk estimation and routing optimization for a wide variety of hazardous materials.Scope and purposeThis paper describes a quantitative risk assessment method for evaluating consequence distributions associated with hazardous materials transportation. This method employs physical models for hazardous materials releases and considerable statistical data from past incidents. The reader will become familiar with important aspects of quantitative risk assessment for hazardous materials releases and observe how such methods can be applied to a problem of practical interest; namely, evaluating distances to which the public should be protected in the event of a transportation-related hazardous materials release.