Emergency response planning for coping with domino effects at chemical and process plants is essential to protect the public and workers’ health and safety, reduce the environmental impacts, and accelerate the resumption of normal operations. The need for domino effects emergency response becomes even more critical in the case of chemical industrial areas (chemical clusters) since a primary fire or explosion at a single plant may trigger external domino effects and impact the entire cluster. So far, much attention has been addressed to developing and implementing emergency planning in single plants with very little attention to multiplant emergency response planning in chemical clusters. This chapter is aimed at developing a multiplant emergency response decision support system for coping with domino effects at chemical clusters. In this way, a primary fire or explosion within the chemical cluster can be effectively handled before it evolves as a domino effect.@en

Accident investigations in process industry indicate that inadequate barrier management has been one of the main causes of many major accidents. Barriers degrade over time and at different rates, and these degradations may gradually and unnoticeably drift the system towards a state of high risk. Conventional barrier management approaches apply fixed inspection and maintenance intervals with little direct influence on daily operations to evaluate safety barriers performance. Such issues are addressed by the dynamic barrier management (DBM) concept through the combination of all available information, such as inspection, preventive maintenance, audit, sensors, process control, and near misses or incident records. DBM main goal is to infer barrier status in near real-time and evaluate its impact on risk level. However, the framework for DBM is not detailed and easy to implement and therefore requires further development to clarify the steps. An approach based on system thinking is suggested. Systems engineering (SE) is a suitable approach for managing complex problems by considering the big picture and the SPADE framework from SE is applied to provide a practical roadmap for DBM.

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