Management of evacuation in case of fire accidents in chemical industrial areas

Abstract Trade-offs between economic and safety arguments exist in the operation of chemical installations, should knock-on calamities induced by fire accidents occur: a sudden installation shutdown might result in substantial economic losses, but may be needed to ensure safety. Due to the very rare nature of domino effect risks induced decision problems an adequate evacuation decision aid model to be used by plant safety management does, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, not exist. This paper develops a tentative approach to calculate the economic gains and/or losses linked to the decision problem whether or not, and when, to evacuate chemical installation(s) threatened by possible domino effect risks. The proposed model is illustrated by a case-study based on empirical data.