Abstract of Meeting Paper

The 1996 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis-Europe

The Assessment of Risks of Transporting Wastes to the Swan Hills Treatment Centre of Chem Security Alberta Ltd. Shortreed, J.H., and Saccomanno, F.F., University of Waterloo, Institute for Risk Research; Ramsay, S., and Hilbert, M., University of Western Ontario, Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel; and Nassar, S., University of Waterloo, Institute for Risk Research

The assessment of risks of transporting wastes to the Swan Hill Treatment Centre introduced a number of innovative risk analysis and risk communication techniques that attempted to provide decision-makers with a sufficient basis for assessing risks. The risk assessment was complicated by changing trends in routes, origins of wastes and composition of wastes. The paper describes both the case study and methodology.

The innovations presented in the paper include:

1. use of a risk communication framework to organize the risk analysis,

2. accurate representation of the waste streams avoiding the usual "worst case" assumption,

3. improved methods for accident rate analysis under conditions of insufficient local data,

4. use of probabilistic analysis throughout, and

5. development of a family of consequence models that can deal with most waste streams and accident scenarios.

The study results are also of interest since it was demonstrated that when total society risk was considered the treatment of wastes results in fewer risks than many other economic activities in Alberta.