Page 22 - Pipeline Risk Management Manual Ideas, Techniques, and Resources

Risk: Theory and
Application

Contents

I The science and philosophy of ris
Embracing paranoia 111
The scientificmethod 1/2
Modeling 113
II. Basicconcepts 113
Hazard 113
Risk 1/4
Farlure 114
Probability 114
Frequency, statistics, and probabi
Failure rates 115
Consequences 116
Risk assessment 117
Riskmanagement 117
Experts 118
111 Uncertainty 118
IY Bsk process-the general steps

1. The science and philosophy of risk
is a measure of the disorder of a system. The thermodynamics law
Embracing paranoia states that “entropy must always increase in the universe and in
any hypothetical isolated system within it” [34]. Practical appli-
One of Murphy’s’ famous laws states that “left to themselves, cation of this law says that to offset the effects of entropy, energy
things will always go from bad to worse.” This humorous predic- must be injected into any system. Without adding energy, the
tion is, in a way, echoed in the second law of thermodynamics. system becomes increasingly disordered.
That law deals with the concept of entropy. Stated simply, entropy Although the law was intended to be a statement of a scien-
tific property, it was seized upon by “philosophers” who
defined system to mean a car, a house, economics, a civiliza-
I Murphy$ laws are famousparodies on scientific laws and l*, humor- tion, or anything that became disordered. By this extrapolation,
ously pointing out all the things that can and often do go wrong in sci- the law explains why a desk or a garage becomes increasingly
ence and life. cluttered until a cleanup (injection of energy) is initiated. Gases