ENV-96-169 PREPARING HAZARD ASSESSMENT AT A REFINERY FOR THE CLEAN AIR ACT 112(r) RISK MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

Description:

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published the final rule of the Risk Management Program (RMP) for the chemical accident prevention provisions on June 20. 1996.’ Petroleum refineries are required by the rule to prepare a full risk management plan which includes a prevention program, an emergency response program, and a hazard assessment. Because refineries are required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Process Safety Management (PSM) Standard’ and other related regulations to implement a prevention program and an emergency response program. the major additional requirement of the EPA RMP is the offsite consequence analysis (OCA) for the hazard assessment. The main purpose of the OCA is to identify an impact zone for the emergency response plan based on a set of release scenarios that are presented in the RMP. Therefore, the identification of various release scenarios is a critical step to a meaningful hazard assessment that can lead to a reasonable emergency response plan.