Why Might The Industry Be Considered Tolerable?

It is quite common to view personal risk in a subjective, natural manner. Many people will not even consider driving a motorcycle, even if their biker friends tell them. The author’s wife is scared of flying believes it is okay for her family to drive to the airport in the same car but not to fly in the same airplane (even though she understands that flying is two orders of magnitude safer). When evaluating relative risk, logic may not always apply.

People working in the process industry should not have the same subjective attitude about risks in the industry. Generally, the people making the risk decisions (e.g., engineers) are usually not the ones faced with the eventual risk (e.g., workers or nearby residents). The companies that had industrial accidents did not go out of business the next day. Therefore, the losses must have been considered “tolerable.” This brings back into question: how many accidents might the industry be willing to consider tolerable? And how many accidents must take place before there is public and political outcry?

There are many petrochemical plants in the United States
A more spontaneous answer might be fifty years. (The reasoning behind this is generally someone’s working life is fifty years, and they do not want anything to happen during their life.) But how long will the plant be around? Let us say 25 years. So take the gun with fifty barrels for example and pull the trigger once a year. What is the likelihood of hitting the bullet? 50%. What if instead of 50 years, you choose 500 years? Then the risk would now be 25/500, or a 5% chance. Should that be tolerable? What about 5,000 years? Now it becomes 0.5%. There is no such thing as zero risk, but just how low must one go for the risk to be considered tolerable? That is the famous question to which there is no scientific