Risk Management for Hazardous Materials Transportation: A Local Study in Lyons

Philippe Hubert and Pierre Pagès

Risk Analysis, 1989, vol. 9, issue 4, 445-451

Abstract: A probabilistic risk assessment study has been undertaken in the French city of Lyons. The issue was to know whether it was justified to forbid hazardous material lorries in the city center and to divert them through the suburbs. Therefore, two routes, the City Center route and the Suburban route were compared. This paper describes the analysis and shows how the results were used in the decision‐making process. It also lists the difficulties that are encountered when trying to incorporate formal risk analysis into actual decision‐making processes. The risk analysis showed that rerouting is an effective option with respect to all criteria. The mathematical expectation of the number of deaths is divided by three, the reduction on the annual frequency of catastrophic accidents is even more important (about one order of magnitude for accidents involving more than 50 deaths). The spatial analysis proved that the risk was more evenly distributed along the Suburban route. However, the annual expected number of death is low: 0.5 in the worst case. So traditional decision‐making approaches do not indicate the necessity of rerouting. Such a situation is believed to be typical for risk management of major hazards. In Lyons, the use of a very small risk aversion factor is sufficient to justify the rerouting option on a formal decision‐aiding basis. This is rather unusual, but it is thought that the recognition of the importance of risk aversion by the decision‐makers themselves is a very positive outcome from this study.

Date: 1989
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1989.tb01255.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:9:y:1989:i:4:p:445-451

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Risk Analysis from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().