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Engineering risk assessment for emergency disposal projects of sudden water pollution incidents

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Abstract

Without an engineering risk assessment for emergency disposal in response to sudden water pollution incidents, responders are prone to be challenged during emergency decision making. To address this gap, the concept and framework of emergency disposal engineering risks are reported in this paper. The proposed risk index system covers three stages consistent with the progress of an emergency disposal project. Fuzzy fault tree analysis (FFTA), a logical and diagrammatic method, was developed to evaluate the potential failure during the process of emergency disposal. The probability of basic events and their combination, which caused the failure of an emergency disposal project, were calculated based on the case of an emergency disposal project of an aniline pollution incident in the Zhuozhang River, Changzhi, China, in 2014. The critical events that can cause the occurrence of a top event (TE) were identified according to their contribution. Finally, advices on how to take measures using limited resources to prevent the failure of a TE are given according to the quantified results of risk magnitude. The proposed approach could be a potential useful safeguard for the implementation of an emergency disposal project during the process of emergency response.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51509061), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2014M551249), and HIT Environment and Ecology Innovation Special Funds (Grant No. HSCJ201607). We are grateful to the significant comments from the editor and anonymous reviewers for adding the quality of the work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Municipal and Environment Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China

    Bin Shi, Jiping Jiang, Rentao Liu & Afed Ullah Khan

  2. State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China

    Peng Wang

Authors
  1. Bin Shi
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  2. Jiping Jiang
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  3. Rentao Liu
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  4. Afed Ullah Khan
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  5. Peng Wang
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Correspondence to Jiping Jiang or Peng Wang.

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Responsible editor: Marcus Schulz

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Shi, B., Jiang, J., Liu, R. et al. Engineering risk assessment for emergency disposal projects of sudden water pollution incidents. Environ Sci Pollut Res 24, 14819–14833 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9078-2

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