THE GEOSCIENCE OF RELIABILITY ENGINEERING – PREPARING POWER GENERATION PLANTS FOR HURRICANES AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS

Industry can no longer afford to take a casual approach to the potential impacts of natural disasters on the operational reliability and integrity of our physical plants and assets. The geoscience community agrees: the climate is changing, and those changes are increasing both the frequency and the ferocity of natural events. Atmospheric geoprocesses are especially capable of producing disasters. Today’s reliability engineers and physical asset managers must adapt to the environmental changes and expand the scope of their risk analysis beyond the confides of the “four walls” of the plant. Most advisory notices related to preparing for and recovering from hurricanes in the petrochemical industry focus almost entirely on the plant, its equipment, and its workers. To adequately address the risks associated with natural disasters, the geosphere -which is the larger system of which the physical plant is a part, must be considered efforts to analyze and to mitigate risks related to natural disasters. Failure do so may yield catastrophic results to sustainability objectives to deliver on the triple bottom line (economic goals, environmental goals and societal goals) to company stakeholders.