(7b) A Non-Stationary Approach to Conducting Site-Specific Integrative Risk Management Assessments at Industrial Facilities at Risk from Extreme Weather Events

The physical forces and environmental stressors that occur during extreme weather events can place facilities at risk for multiple infrastructure failures, loss of operations, product loss, and major impactful chemical releases; all of which affect directly the company’s bottom line. Hurricane Harvey (2017) resulted in over 100 such failures and chemical releases. Going forward, non-static (non-stationary) risk management approaches, wherein risk predictions incorporate and account for evolving environmental factors such as continuous sea level rise, will allow us to more accurately predict storm surge flooding as a function of time and provide more realistic long-term (decades) predictions to assist in actionable planning. An integrated 3-part approach to assessing risk of infrastructure damage and chemical releases and the business and legal consequences therefrom will be presented. This approach consists of: a) developing temporally variant and spatially localized probabilistic predictions of flooding and forces related to flooding (FloodScore^TM) with unprecedented resolution; b) the development of detailed impact predictions on facility infrastructure and structural and supporting elements thereof based in these predictions; and c) a quantitative means of scoring the environmental/financial risk and consequences of chemicals releases as derived from (b). This integrated approach which assesses risk of losses in the near term and out to 50 years includes the assessment of ecological and human impact levels and provides actionable information for resiliency and risk mitigation planning.