The cost of natural disasters

Philip Myers and Earl Crochet run through the latest updates coming to API 656 – Aboveground storage tank operations during uncontrollable natural disasters

DURING THE first six months of 2021, there have been eight separate billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events across the US. The eye-opening plot in Figure 1 shows the magnitude of problems associated with natural disaster events, referred to as ‘natech’, which means ‘natural hazard-triggered technological event’. Natechs can occur any time natural disasters interact with petroleum or chemical storage facilities and their local associated societal infrastructure. A recent stretch of extreme cold weather in Texas was a good example of a serious natech. In this event important energy infrastructure was knocked out resulting in numerous problems and unfortunately, loss of life. As a current natech example on the west coast of the US, extreme heat is creating unprecedented wildfires threatening infrastructure, homes and lives. Certainly, the recent floods in China’s Henan Province are producing numerous serious natechs. A glance at Figure 1 quickly shows an increasing trend in both the number and the cost associated with US natechs. It also shows that the lion’s share can be attributed to severe storms and tropical cyclones or hurricanes.

DEVELOPING GUIDANCE

Work on natechs began in earnest with the Joint Research Center (JRC), which is a knowledge and science service that supports EU policy, as well as organisations like the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), which is the UN’s focal point for disaster risk reduction. Numerous papers began to appear in the early 2000s and continue to this day, primarily authored by Europeans. In August of 2017 the category 4 Hurricane Harvey deluged areas of southeast Texas, resulted in major flooding and 68 deaths. It cost society US$125 billion (€107 billion). A chemical incident was initiated by the flooding at an organic peroxides storage facility in Crosby, Texas. The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) investigated this incident and called for industry to develop guidance related to natural disasters. As a result, in 2019 the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) published CCPS Monograph: Assessment of and planning for natural hazards, which was prompted by the request of the CSB to develop guidance for the combined natural disaster events and hazardous material releases. The American Petroleum Institute (API) Subcommittee on Aboveground Storage Tanks (SCAST) decided that it would be useful to address natechs issues related to petroleum storage facilities. Storage tank incidents caused by natechs are one of the most serious contributors to the problem, since they store large volumes of hazardous materials and are relatively ‘fragile’. The American Chemistry Council (ACC) is participating, along with other organisations, in the development of a new publication, API 656, that will specifically address storage tanks and natech.

01

02

Process equipment; 11; 22%

Storage; 40; 78%

Source: JRC Source: JRC

ADDING VALUE TO EXISTING PRACTICES

You may ask how natech is different from the years of work the petroleum and chemical industries have put into improvement of environmental, safety improvement, and incident reduction, including the comprehensive standards such as the Process Safety Management and fully developed design rules covered by API standards and others such as ASCE-7. There are many ways that API 656 will add significant value to existing practices when looking specifically at natech avoidance and mitigation. Codes and standards, as well as best practices, are typically based on mean recurrence intervals (MRIs) which can be exceeded. For example, many areas subject to flooding are using a 100-year flood criteria. This criterion yields a 26% chance of exceeding that flood designation over a 30-year period. Other criteria specified by ASCE7-16 range up to nearly 2,500 years. Facilities may wish to use other more uniform and appropriate criteria and these are not well-addressed currently. Most facilities have a long history of upgrades and changes that can span decades. This means that older parts of the facilities were designed and constructed with older and possibly obsolete designs, methods, and construction techniques. This is particularly true, for example, with seismic design and construction practices for storage tanks. API 656 will show how prudent owners/operators should consider this issue. During hurricanes and storms there are multiple effects including flooding, rain, wind, moving water and even breaking waves in coastal regions. During these times, facilities scramble to get oil to ballast their tanks. But most do not know how much oil is required and react by putting more ballast than is actually needed. This results in a shortage for everyone and the inability to get the right kinds of products into tanks to maintain compatibility and quick return to ‘normal’. API 656 will provide easy to use charts that show what is needed in a manner that is suitable for assessing and planning for hundreds of tanks at once at a refinery, chemical or petroleum storage terminal. Even with the best of planning, design criteria can be exceeded, and API 656 will cover the basic concepts of resiliency for storage facilities. Resilience is the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and recover rapidly from disruptions. Resilience is both about the affected company or organisation and the community and stakeholders that it affects. One of the most beneficial aspects of resilience is to assume that the safeguards are overwhelmed and then to seriously examine the consequences and determine what can be done to mitigate/ recover from failure. For example, there may be multiple simultaneous releases and/or fires; emergency response may be delayed or not available due to evacuation orders, loss of highways and roads, the need to release hazardous chemicals such as ammonia or chlorine as was the case in the 1999 Turkey Kocaeli earthquake incident, or other domino affects. API 656 will incorporate the principles in its scope as outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (US Dept of Commerce). Useful information can be found at https://www.nist.gov/system/

files/documents/2019/04/03/ nist_community_resilience_12_page_ brochure.pdf.

A SPECIFIC RESOURCE

While there are many general documents, data sources, and papers relating to the assessment and understanding general natech, it is clear there is a need to specifically address storage tank facilities in the context of natech. A tentative organisation for the document is give in this figure: The first draft has been completed and it is expected that this publication will be available in 2022. Figure 18. Distribution of storm-triggered Natech events by the type of structure ( triggered by rain and flood) only accidents For more information: Philip Myers (phil@pemyconsulting.com) and Earl Crochet (earl@crochetmc.com) are the co-chairs of API 656. Contact them directly to learn more. Notice: the view and opinions expressed in this paper are strictly the authors and do not represent the opinions and perspectives of API or any other organisation. 01 US billion-dollar disaster events 1980-2021 (CPI-adjusted) 02 Distribution of storm-triggered natech events Source: JRC by the type of structure (only accidents triggered by rain and flood source)

API 656 PETROLEUM AND CHEMICAL

22 STORAGE FACILITY NATECH

Contents Appendices

• Front matter 1. How to start natech (forward...) assessment • Scope 2. Decision and risk • Introduction concepts • Codes criteria for 3. Exceedance and MRI natural hazard severity 4. Hurricane flood and • Retrospective code wind criteria 5. Excess floating roof • Grandfathering rain • Motivation 6. Resiliency (to be written) • Planning 7. Secondary • How to start containment • Resiliency 8. Initiator datasheets • Secondary 9. List of questionscontainment 10. Annotated bibliography • Concluding remarks • Appendices

Table 1: Structure of API 656 Tank Natech Initiator Datasheets

Lightning Seismic Tsunami Hurricane Flooding (riverine and coastal) Tornado Landslide Extreme high temperature Extreme low temperature Ice storms Droughts Wildfire Volcano