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Some WKMC beliefs regarding pipeline risk management:
1. Risk Management techniques are fundamentally decision-support tools. Operators will find most valuable, a process that takes available information and assimilates it into some clear, simple results. Actions can then be based directly on those simple results.
2. Intelligent Simplification: We must go through some complexity in order to achieve "intelligent simplification." Many processes, originating from sometimes complex scientific principles, are "behind the scenes" in a good risk assessment system. These must be well documented and available, but needn’t interfere with the casual users of the methodology (don't need to understand the engine in order to get benefit from the vehicle).
3. Resource allocation (or re-allocation) is normally the most reasonable way to practice risk management. Costs must therefore play a role in risk management. Since resources are finite, the optimum allocation of those scarce resources is sought.
4. There are many variables impacting the risk. Among all possible variables, choices are required in order to balance between a comprehensive model (gets all the important stuff) and an unwieldy model (too many relatively unimportant details). Users should be allowed to determine their own optimum level of complexity. Some will choose to capture much detailed information because they already have it available, others will want to get started with a very simple framework. However, by using the same overall risk assessment framework, results can still be compared: from very detailed approaches to overview approaches.
5. A proper amount of modeling "resolution" is needed. The model should be able to quantify the benefit of any and all actions: from something as simple as "add a fire extinguisher" all the way up to "install double-bottoms on all tanks."
6. The risk assessment methodology should ‘get smarter’ as we ourselves learn. As more information becomes available or as new techniques come into favor, the methodology should be flexible enough to incorporate the new knowledge, whether that new knowledge is in the form of hard statistics, new beliefs, or better ways to combine risk variables.
We suggest that certain additional characteristics are important to the success of any risk assessment effort. Therefore, the following aspects of a risk assessment methodology are recommended:
1. Methodology is robust enough to apply to small as well as large facilities; allowing an operator to divide a large facility into small units for comparisons within a station as well as between stations.
2. Methodology has the ability to distinguish between products handled by including critical fluid properties, derived from easy-to-obtain product information such as MSD sheets.
3. Methodology should be easy to set up on paper or in an electronic spreadsheet, and also easy to migrate to more robust database software for more rigorous applications.
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4. Methodology documentation should provide the user the simple steps, but also provide the background (sometimes complex) underlying the simple steps. Engineers will normally seek a rational basis underpinning a system before they will accept it. Therefore, the basis must be well documented.
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