Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

15.4 Hazard Identification and Evaluation

Why do a risk assessment? In many modern endeavors, the consequence of misperformance and casualties resulting from internal and external events can lead to dire consequences and liabilities, both civil and criminal. In order to protect people and their environment and thus avoid these liabilities, some methods of identifying the potential hazards (consequences) and the causes within the operation that could lead to these hazards/consequences must be utilized. In many cases, a hazard analysis is performed to identify and classify the hazards from an initiating event. There are several methods that have been developed to perform this analysis utilizing different schemes to perform and document the analysis. The individual technique utilized is not as important as consistent and defensible application of the technique used in identification and classification. For example, an analyst would probably not want to classify one of two events leading to human casualties as severe and the other event as insignificant. Another possible error would be to classify a short-term release exceeding EPA regulatory standards with no quantifiable adverse environmental effects as critical while characterizing an event that leads to an occupational exposure that hospitalizes several workers and neighbors as negligible (3).