Multiplant emergency planning in the event of domino effects

Abstract

Emergency response planning for coping with domino effects at chemical and process plants is essential to protect the public and workers’ health and safety, reduce the environmental impacts, and accelerate the resumption of normal operations. The need for domino effects emergency response becomes even more critical in the case of chemical industrial areas (chemical clusters) since a primary fire or explosion at a single plant may trigger external domino effects and impact the entire cluster. So far, much attention has been addressed to developing and implementing emergency planning in single plants with very little attention to multiplant emergency response planning in chemical clusters. This chapter is aimed at developing a multiplant emergency response decision support system for coping with domino effects at chemical clusters. In this way, a primary fire or explosion within the chemical cluster can be effectively handled before it evolves as a domino effect.