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Threat from and threat to concepts

In our courses we always introduce the Threat from and threat to concepts because they apply to risk assessment and risk management. Oftentimes engineers and technical people have a “facility-centric” approach. This means they see the facility they are studying as a potential source of hazard exposures. In mining, this means looking for example at the pit or tailings as the sources of hazards to “the environment”. Thus, oftentimes the analysts see the facility as generating threats to the population,…

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Cyber attacks leave physical consequences

We are pleased to see that FM Global recognize the fact that Cyber attacks leave physical consequences. Some context on physical consequences Last year in 2019 we wrote about an aluminum maker forced to shut down  operations because of a ransomware attack. Successful hacking on industrial systems seemed to remain “isolated exploits” for a long time. For example, in 2014 hackers struck a steel mill in Germany. They did so by manipulating and disrupting the industrial control systems (ICS) to such a…

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Germs, Shipping and Force Majeure

A discussion on Germs, Shipping and Force Majeure seems appropriate given the corona virus epidemic evolution and our experience. Indeed clients have asked us to perform risk assessments and business interruption quantifications of harbors, wharves, and ships loader-unloader in many occasions. If we are looking to quantify business interruption of a shipping facility, we have to break the informational silo. Looking at categories of hazards one by one would limit the resulting understanding of the risk landscape. Indeed, cyber hazards,…

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Why climate risk and consequence overcost have common similarities

Today we look at why climate risk and consequence overcost have common similarities. Have you ever been involved in a project whose final budget exploded due to consequence of apparently small, negligible schedule or material risks? Similarly, even thus we record small change in weather averages, big impacts are being noticed. Let’s find out why this happens. Probability of overcost vs. Likelihood of event Lets suppose the consequences of a risk scenario vary between 0 and 20M$ with an average…

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