Environmental Consequences Of Uncontrolled Accidents

Accidents are a detrimental factor in many different industries and constitute a potential source of human loss, equipment damage and environmental impact. As the Petroleum refineries are generally acknowledged to be high hazard sites (Wood and Guenes, 2015) it is important to take into consideration that in a number of cases, the resulting fatalities and serious injuries can cost millions of dollars. The risk of accidents is associated with the presence of thousands of tonnes of oil into various product lines each year many of which are flammable, toxic to human health or toxic to the environment and under such conditions that an uncontrolled accident could have significant consequences to the immediate area (Christou, 1999). The consequences

However, associated socio-economic effects also play an important role in the overall impact assessment (Etkin, 1999).

The learning from experience process is widely acknowledged as one of the pillar of modern approaches of risk management (Dechy et al., 2008), it is necessary to help prevent future reoccurrence. The petroleum refining industry need to learn the lessons, which will be used as one of operational intelligence streams to better plan its interventions and to ensure resources are targeted where they can be of most benefit (Hare et al., 2009).

Over the past few decades, a vast amount of scientific literature has been generated on the subject of learning from past accidents associated with industrial activity such as the studies of Kletz (2001) , Lizhong et al., (2002), Hudson (2003), Ohtani and Kobayashi (2005), Liu et al., (2005), Sweis (2006), Nivolianitou et al., (2006), Konstandinidou et al., (2006), Gil and Atherton (2007), Hare et al (2009), Abdolhamidzadeh et al., (2011), Mihailidou et al.,(2012), Fabiano and Currò (2012), Zhang and Zheng (2012), Calvo et al., (2014), Vastveit et al., (2015), Ramírez-Camacho et al., (2016). A significant part of these studies is devoted to petroleum refining