Quantitative Ecological Risk Assessment of Industrial Accidents: The Case of Oil Ship Transportation in the Coastal Tropical Area of Northeastern Brazil |
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Authors: | Heitor de Oliveira Duarte Enrique López Droguett Moacyr Araújo Simone Ferreira Teixeira |
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Affiliation: | 1. Centre for Risk Analysis and Environmental Modeling (CEERMA) , Federal University of Pernambuco , Recife , Pernambuco , Brazil;2. Tropical Fish Ecology Lab, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas , University of Pernambuco , Recife , Pernambuco , Brazil |
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Abstract: | Accidents such as toxic spills can cause massive damage to local ecosystems and hamper the sustainable development of hazardous industries. Models that only consider regularly occurring pollution are unable to truly quantify ecological risks (ecorisks) from these industries. This work presents a methodology capable of quantifying ecorisks related to rare and extreme events such as industrial accidents. We developed a procedure that integrates information from different studies that contributes to characterize ecorisks from industrial accidents: (1) reliability analysis, (2) fate and transport modeling, (3) individual-level toxicological assessment, and (4) population modeling. The methodology is exemplified by an application to oil ship transportation to supply Brazil's Suape industrial complex. A fish population was strategically chosen to represent the ecosystem's health of Suape beach. For the critical accidental scenarios, their frequencies of occurrence were estimated and the space–time evolution of oil simulated. The ecorisks were quantified in terms of time and population probability of fish extinction, categorized and compared against a no-accident scenario. The total ecorisks from all scenarios were presented as a FN curve, where N is the average number of deaths in the population and F the cumulative frequency of accidents with potential to cause N or more deaths. |
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Keywords: | probabilistic ecological risk assessment oil spill Suape Port frequency estimates stochastic population modeling oil plume dispersion. |
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