Quantifying and Controlling Catastrophic Risks

This is a book about societal and environmental risks and how to quantify their likelihood of occurrence for the good of the public.

Quantifying and Controlling Catastrophic Risks - by B. John GarrickContributions by:  Christie R.F., Hornberger G.M., Kilger M., Stetkar J.W.

Key Features

Tools for calculating and controlling risk.
Systematic method for ranking societal threats.
Includes both natural and industrial catastrophes.
Case studies drawn from the author's own experience.
The book builds on the theme that the benefit of quantitative risk assessment is to increase the confidence in making the right decisions with respect to managing risk. The emphasis is on human initiated and natural risks that are rare, but have the potential for catastrophic consequences in terms of human fatalities and environmental damage. The thrust of the methodology presented is for quantifying risks that are not only rare with catastrophic potential, but risks about which there is very limited supporting evidence. Thus, the uncertainty sciences and inferential reasoning are cornerstones of the methodology. The methodology presented is applied to four case studies having to do with the hurricane risk in New Orleans, Louisiana, the risk of a high energy asteroid impacting the 48 contiguous states of the U.S., a terrorist attack of a specific region of the national grid, and the risk of an abrupt climate change in the north Atlantic coastal states. The book ends with a proposal for a suggested path forward for increasing the public’s knowledge about such risks as a critical step towards influencing stronger leadership in managing catastrophic risks to society.

Read Appendix A

For a review of the subject book, “Quantifying and Controlling Catastrophic Risks” see Risk Analysis, Vol. 30, No. 10, 2010, page 1623.

Other Selected References

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Lewis, H.W., Technological Risk, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1990.
Bernstein, P.L., Against the Gods, The Remarkable Story of Risk, Wiley, New  York, 1996.
Fullwood, R.F., Probabilistic Safety Assessment in the Chemical and Nuclear Industries, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2000, 1968.
Haimes, Y.Y., Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management, Wiley, New York, 1998.
Abkowitz, M. D., Operational Risk Management: A Case Study Approach to Effective Planning and Response, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008.
Green, A.E., Editor, High Risk Safety Technology, John Wiley & Sons, 1982.
Molak, V., Editor, Fundamentals of Risk Analysis and Risk Management, CRC Lewis Publishers, 1997.
McCormick, N.J., Reliability and Risk Analysis: Methods and Nuclear Power Applications, Academic Press, 1981.
Blockley, D., Editor, Engineering Safety, McGraw-Hill International, UK, 1992.
ISBN: 978-0-12-374601-6, Elsevier Inc., Amsterdam, 2008.

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