Risk Assessment and Accident Investigation

Incident investigation is both a useful input into a risk assessment and a consumer of risk assessment results. In the former, learnings from the incident are almost always relevant to other portions of other pipelines. In the latter, especially when responsibility (blame) is to be assigned, what should have been known, via risk assessment, prior to the incident is almost always relevant. From this, the risk management decision-making will normally be challenged by parties having suffered damage from the incident.

Retro-fitting a risk assessment for this type of application uses the same steps as any other risk assessment. Care must be exercised to not introduce hindsight, if the assessment is to truly reflect what was/should-have-been known immediately prior to the incident.