The use of event trees in oil spill prevention applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the applicability of event tree analysis, a method for identifying and analyzing potential accident scenarios, to the problem of oil spill prevention. It is shown that when a generic set of safety functions (identified from an analysis of 10 oil spill case studies) is used, event trees do provide an accurate and useful representation of the sequences of events leading up to and following an oil spill. Possible insights resulting from an event tree analysis and particular insights from the case studies are discussed.