Coping with flood Natech events: A safety framework to make chemical clusters more resilient

Industrial accidents triggered by natural disasters (Natech events) pose huge threats to chemical clusters. Flood is a significant cause of Natech events, the interactions between flood and chemical installations may lead to complex accident scenarios. However, the chemical clusters are often not well prepared for flood Natech events due to the lack of guidance on how to implement prevention and mitigation measures. In this paper, the characteristics of flood Natech events are firstly discussed, which provide a clear understanding of accident evolution. Based on the review of several Chinese standards related to flood prevention in chemical clusters, corresponding requirements are summarized. The requirements mainly focus on the planning and design stages. To cope with flood Natech events in a long-term vision, a comprehensive safety framework for chemical clusters is proposed in this article considering a resilient viewpoint, in which different roles of government, chemical cluster, and chemical plant are discussed. Moreover, three sub-models are divided to manage safety measures before, during, and after accidents, contributing to improving the resisting ability, adaptability, and recoverability of chemical clusters to flood Natech events, respectively.