Archives

Archive

Should you listen to your insurer for your business cyber risk management?

Cyber security is a relatively new subject in businesses management. It first emerged in the 80ies with password guessing, featured in movies like Wargame with the rudimentary attack sophistication of those times. But Should you listen to your insurer for your business cyber risk management? The attack sophistication increased gradually. By the end of 2000, elaborate hacking devices (Stuxnet worm) that could only be issued by cooperating military forces were born. To date no state has officially claimed ownership. However anonymous…

Read More

Brazilian Tailings Dam Failure

The short movie  below was uploaded in March 2014 (the course was given in Brazil in the Fall 2013). The course was given to over forty Engineers and Technicians in charge of various mines and tailings dams in Brazil. It was followed by a conference we gave at the university of Minas Gerais. Now the catastrophe has occurred. The physical, reputational and social damages are clear to anyone. Let’s see if the Brazilian legal system will actually follow through with…

Read More

Old Mines, Tainted Waters and The Plagues of Egypt.

Old Mines, Tainted Waters and The Plagues of Egypt. I have always been of the opinion that mythology, ancient Greek Gods, the disappearance of Atlantis, the Plagues of Egypt and many more “legends” were actually accounts of real events, reinterpreted, distorted and made more vivid by millennials of oral transmission, re-interpretations and sheer thrill in magnifying horror stories still present in our media. At each new report of massive oil spills, red tides, masses of plastic debris floating in our…

Read More

Your neighbor’s (third party) operational hazards can generate risks requiring a strategic shift.

Your neighbor’s (third party) operational hazards can generate risks requiring a strategic shift. We live in a complex interconnected world which generates interdependencies some times very difficult to detect/understand. Interdependencies are of different kinds: physical, geographical, logical, cyber. Your neighbor’s (third party) operational hazards can generate risks requiring a strategic shift. Here are some examples of interdependencies The US Pentagon mistakenly sent live anthrax to at least nine labs in the US and to a US military base in South Korea…

Read More

Is it true that bite-sized development are less risky than mega mines?

bite-sized development are less risky than mega mines? The world’s gold miners and most likely other capital intensive industries are changing their views: after decades of mega projects, many of which have backfired or proven to be disastrous, the new credo is “bigger isn’t better”. At Riskope we have been in the situation where we had to exhort clients to pull the plug on such projects following the results of preliminary holistic risk assessments: very painful moments indeed, when you…

Read More

Comparative Decision Analysis-Economic Safety Margin (CDA-ESM): finally an alternative to the obsolete NPV.

We have included CDA/ESM  in our Edumine Risk courses for mining for many years. In 2010 we published the article (STOP PROCRASTINATING! NPV IS DEAD: USE RISK AS A KEY DECISION PARAMETER.) in the Canadian Reclamation. Indeed it showed two mining applications. Is CDA/ESM more complex than NPV? Yes, of course! Like a motorcycle is more complex than a motorbike. The point here is that NPV will not take you anywhere safely. Indeed it is misleading, especially for long term projects…

Read More

A risk perspective on the concerns raised by the liability of hauling dangerous goods

A risk perspective on the concerns raised by the liability of hauling dangerous goods Riskope thanks Federico Sasso for participating to this research during his summer 2014 internship. The recent Trichloroisocyanuric acid fire event in Port Metro Vancouver raised again concerns related to hauling dangerous goods, immediately reinforced by a new series of crude derailments in Canada, US. It is a topic that we are familiar with since Riskope have performed many risk assessment, and calibrated emergency response plans for…

Read More

Optimum Risk Estimates, ORE

Optimum Risk Estimates, ORE ORE starts by asking its users to model the systems using a «fractal like» tile modelling tool (we call them jokingly “risk-engineering Lego”) which helps defining external and internal hazards and focuses the user attention to the interdependent performances of each node. ORE value proposition can be summarized as a quantified FMEA with the systematicity of a HAZOP, without the necessity to delve into the smallest components, at first, as ORE analysis/hazard identification is SCALABLE. Within…

Read More

Hosted and powered by WR London.