Earthquake Natech Risk Assessment and Mapping using RAPID-N

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and landslides, can impact industrial installations that process or store hazardous materials, potentially causing major accidents with fires, explosions or toxic releases. Accidents of this type are commonly referred to as Natech accidents (Showalter and Myers, 1994). Numerous Natech accidents in the wake of past natural events are testimony to the possibly major disaster potential of this type of accidents (Lindell and Perry, 1997; Steinberg and Cruz, 2004; Durukal and Erdik, 2008, Girgin, 2011, Krausmann and Cruz, 2013). A recent study on the status of Natech risk management in the EU and the OECD found an increase in Natech risk awareness but it also highlighted significant gaps in the development of methodologies for analysing and mapping Natech risk (Krausmann and Baranzini, 2012). However, for decisions relating to the siting of new or the retrofitting needs of existing hazardous installations, and for emergency planning, Natech-prone areas need to be identified and the associated risk adequately assessed. In order to fill this gap, a web-based rapid Natech risk assessment and mapping framework called RAPID-N was developed. It is available at http://rapidn.jrc.ec.europa.eu. While the framework is in principle applicable to any kind of natural disaster, it has currently been implemented for earthquake impact on industrial facilities. RAPID-N features a modular structure in which four self-contained but interconnected subsystems focus on the individual aspects related to Natech risk assessment and mapping (Girgin and Krausmann, 2013). These modules are 1) a scientific module, 2) a natural hazards module, 3) an industrial plants and units module, and 4) the Natech risk assessment module. The scientific module supports scientific tasks and computations but it also provides the property definition and estimation framework upon which RAPID-N’s risk assessment functionality is built. Due to the complexity of a multi-disciplinary problem like Natech risk assessment, the property definition and estimation framework was created to reduce the amount of data to be entered by the users, to provide default values for missing data, to estimate required damage and consequence parameters, and to guarantee a higher flexibility of the risk assessment by allowing the definition of alternative calculation methods by the users. The natural hazard module provides the source and on-site natural hazard data required for the Natech risk assessment. Both historical and scenario natural hazards are supported. For earthquakes, it estimates the earthquake hazard parameters at the site of the hazardous installations of interest using location-specific attenuation relationships, which are subsequently needed for the risk assessment. The industrial plants and units module collects physical data on industrial facilities and equipment found on site. This information includes data such as location, unit types and operating conditions, and stored substance properties. A special mapping tool is provided with RAPID-N to easily locate and delineate plant boundaries, and to identify their units using publicly available satellite imagery. The Natech risk assessment module calculates the natural hazard damage to industrial units, performs the consequence analysis, and maps the results in a GIS environment. It includes: