We have discussed credible events and black swans several times in this blog, but this time it is different. We do have a real black swan event and we can show it is incredible! 31st December 2019 to end of February I can still recall champagne popping on December 31st 2019. Everyone was merry, the expectations for an incredible 2020, a bissextile year on top of that, were flamboyant. Yes, pun intended. Flying to Italy from Brazil on January 23rd …
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Lately several tailings dam failures rocked the mining world. Despite the relative high frequency of these events we have heard engineers qualify the failures as “one in a million”, “extremely rare” or even “black swans”. Today we want to discuss a few concepts on tailings dams design and experience. In particular, we will focus on some disconcerting qualifiers like the ones we just cited above. For example, given the experience of tailings dams catastrophic failures resulting from combinations of various…
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Personal human experience, bounded rationality and deception of credible scenario are important in the context of risk identification. Risk identification is a fundamental phase of a risk assessment. It intervenes after system and objectives definition. Oftentimes we hear that practitioners consider only credible scenarios in a risk identification exercise. Today we explore why only considering credible scenario is a deception and could lead you to disaster. Incidentally, this might be one of the reasons leading numerous unrealistic risk assessment…
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Geohazards probabilities frequencies and insurance denial In the anthropocene insurers are facing “new” challenges when insuring against Geohazards. That is true especially for those caused by Human activity. Indeed geohazards probabilities, frequencies and insurance denial constitute a bundle. Insurers have realized that, because of the dynamic evolution, the usual actuarial point of view faces significant challenges and can be misleading. The indiscriminate use of Force Majeure and Insurance denial to protect themselves is actually detrimental to their business and their…
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