Here’s a advance draft of an article to be included in an upcoming ASME textbook. Geohaz Essay ASME wkm Rev C
Author: WKM Staff
The Essential Elements of Pipeline Risk Assessment
Here’s an update to the original 2012 article introducing the essential elements of pipeline risk assessment. Little has changed–the originally introduced elements seem to be robust and comprehensive, as suggested by having weathered a few years of scrutiny now. PIN_March_2018_Kent_Muhlbauer
Statistical Life Valuation
As monetization of risk becomes more mainstream, values must be assigned to the potential for human injury or fatality. The risk assessor need not generate values himself since such numbers are published in various sources. This includes values that have been used in US government decision-making for years. Here is some example guidance: VSL Guidance 2013 […]
Can you explain more about Geohazards and Weather-Related Outside Forces?
Geohazards and Weather-Related Outside Force The threat category ‘Outside Force’ in a risk assessment typically includes forces such as ground/earth movement, flooding, cold weather, and lightning. When buried pipelines cross sloping terrain, there is a danger that soil movement (down the slope) will impose an excessive load on the pipe that could lead to failure. […]
Optimizing the use of Inspection Results
A limitation that continues to plague older risk assessment methodologies is the inability to fully include the results of inspections. None dispute the value of inspection and its critical role in failure avoidance. Yet, neither the classical statistics-centric QRA nor the common relative risk ranking methodologies, can capture inspection activity in a meaningful way. A […]
Risk Profiling
Pipeline Risk Assessment—Risk Profiling In earlier installments of this column, we introduced the concept of pipeline risk assessment Essential Elements (EE’s). That guideline is a list of ingredients that must be included in any pipeline risk assessment before that assessment can be considered complete. Following these guidelines helps to ensure a technically sound risk assessment […]
CoF Data Analyses
How well do the PHMSA reportable incident consequences track other incident data? More interesting work by Joel Anderson. CoF_multiplot
CoF vs PIR
How well correlated are PHMSA reportable incident consequences with PIR? more interesting work from Joel Anderson CoF_vs_PIR_vs_Class
Decision Trees and Risk Assessment
An interesting contribution from Joel Anderson Pipeline Risk algorithms can take in hundreds of variables and perform hundreds more calculations to determine the probability of failure for a given segment of pipe. Trying to determine what threats are biggest contributor to a system’s risk or even over the length of a given line can be […]
How do we Assess for Geohazards?
Many miles of pipeline around the world are subject to damage from geohazards. As used here, ‘geohazard’ refers to any earth movements sufficient to damage a pipeline, and can also include weather- and water-related events that are potentially damaging. So, we often group, under the heading ‘geohazard’, a wide range of phenomena such as: landslide […]