Consequence assessment
Estimating the impact of accident scenarios

Overview

Many things can go wrong on a high-risk industrial facility, leading to an unintended release of hazardous material, an uncontrolled release of energy or some other accidental loss. Consequence assessment is a rigorous and methodical examination of the direct undesirable impacts of a loss of containment of material or energy, including fires and explosions. It consists of estimating impacts on people, the environment and the process equipment.

Consequence assessment has applications in:

• the design of new facilities, for instance in suggesting optimal separation distances between units, to avoid domino effects

• risk assessment of a facility to provide input to a safety case

• emergency planning and land use planning: estimate impact distances for major accident scenarios

This submodule is a part of the hazard analysis module.

Course material

Consequence modelling: overview of hazards Lecture slides (PDF)

Other resources

We recommend the following sources of further information on this topic:

• Fire, Explosion and Risk Assessment Topic Guidance from the UK HSE’s Hazardous Installations Directorate

• The IOGP report Risk Assessment Data Directory

• The famous Yellow Book published by TNO contains large amounts of information on hazardous phenomena

• DNV GL Software’s YouTube channel presents a number of their software tools for consequence assessment, including PHAST-Risk

• The US Chemical Safety Board safety video Dangerously Close: Explosion in West, Texas illustrates the importance of land-use planning in mitigating the effect of industrial accidents.