There is a trend, which some already argue has reached absurd proportions, to try to remove risk altogether from every area of life, be it the kids’ playground or a modern factory.
The single sector that probably best understands the issue of risk is the airline business.
Not only are aircraft designed and built with back-up systems for virtually every part of the plane, except the wings, but there are regularly-repeated standard procedures mandated to ensure that pilots, mechanics and air traffic control personnel are all well aware of the latest technology and developments.
As the worrying battery fires in Boeing’s revolutionary Dreamliner demonstrate, when it comes to flying hundreds of passengers around the world in complete safety, no extra security measure is ever too small to undertake.
However it seems that there are some risks, which even the most sophisticated computer modeling is unable to predict. The blackout of the East Coast of the United States was a classic case of a completely unforeseen risk. One of the busiest and most populous parts of the globe was brought to a standstill for up to two days because of the failure of a component. That tiny occurrence caused a power plant to shut down as a precautionary measure, thus imposing extra load demand on other power stations, which in their turn shut down for safety’s sake. Within a matter of minutes, 55 million people had been affected, several thousand of them discovering the nightmare of being stuck in elevators for hours.
Jeddah has now experienced its own “East Coast Moment,” specifically at Jeddah Islamic Port. A fire seriously damaged a sugar plant in the port’s industrial city. An unfortunate event in itself but one where the damage was mitigated by the prompt and efficient response of the fire brigade. But there was something else. The damage to the plant meant that polluted water from the site found its way into the water supply and also apparently damaged the distribution system.
This has had the astonished effect of forcing the complete closure or severe limitation of the operations of some 700 other factories in the industrial city. The cost to these businesses in terms of lost production is clearly considerable. Those firms that have tried to keep going have been trucking in their own water, at a far greater cost that they would have paid for the mains supply. One industrialist has described the whole event as catastrophic.
This brings back the issue of risk management. It is not yet clear how the mains water supplies to the industrial city are arranged. It seems reasonable to suppose that there is a central main and that customers take their water from spurs that connect to it. Depending on the industrial processes involved, the take-off system will have filtration and probably non-return valves. The design of this water distribution should have taken into account the impact of an event such as the sugar factory fire. It has to be assumed that in the normal course of events, the rest of the system would not have been affected.
But affected it clearly was. It has lost the 25,000 cubic meters of water 700 factories need every day. There is always, of course, the remote possibility that the contractors who built the system failed to conform to design specifications, either in the quality of the materials that they used or simply by ignoring the drawings. Yet it seems unthinkable that such a failure could have occurred with independent project managers, consultants and architects employed to sign off every stage of the work.
Therefore the most likely cause is that there was a risk that somehow or other was not recognized or, it if was, was inadequately addressed. Figuring out what went wrong is not going to be easy and may indeed be complicated by the fact that different companies and organizations have been involved in the designing and building and operation of the industrial city.
Notwithstanding these complications, it is clearly imperative that precisely what went wrong be found out. Once the cause is established beyond doubt, then the process of mitigating that risk can get under way. This is important, for not just for this industrial city, but for all the other such facilities that are springing up all over the Kingdom in the dramatic drive to grow our nonoil economy. It could be that the selfsame error in design or materials or operational circumstance has been overlooked. Industrial managers in similar industrial areas need the commercial comfort of knowing either, that it is not going to happen to them or that the risk has been identified and mitigation measures put in place.
Editorial: Too much risk and not enough analysis
