Risk mitigation at the stage of developing technical specifications

Summary

Formulating a sound approach to mitigating the risks arising during upgrading (retechnologization) the existing wastewater treatment facilities or constructing new ones, involves considering the life cycle as a natural sequence of stages of ensuring environmental protection measures. Incomplete information on the facility at the stage of developing technical specifications entails unprofitable expenditure of funds for the construction or upgrade (retechnologization) of treatment facilities, which affects achieving the required efficiency of wastewater treatment. A matrix of risks with their point assessment is presented. The seriousness of the consequences in a qualitative representation is estimated in points by multiplying the weighting coefficient of the «cause of the event occurrence» by the weighting coefficient of the «probability of the cause occurrence». Analyzing the risk matrix provided for establishing that, in addition to natural disasters, the causes leading to unacceptable consequences include, among other things, the errors that occur while developing technical specifications. For the risk analysis the «bow-tie» method is considered with the indication of the barriers between causes and hazardous events, as well as hazardous events and their consequences. Thus, a correctly performed risk analysis at the early stages of the life cycle of the treatment facilities provides for both selecting a water treatment technology with a minimum set of unknown risks, and minimizing the anticipated costs of preventing emergency situations that arise.

Key words

sewerage treatment facilities , life cycle of the equipment , technical specifications , risk mitigation , risk matrix , «bow-tie» method of the risk analysis , proactive barriers , reactive barriers , risk management , risk realization consequences , risk mitigation measures