About Assessing Risks

When you conduct a Hazards Analysis, you will assess the risk associated with a given hazardous scenario to help you determine what actions should be taken to prevent or lessen the consequences of that scenario. Using a risk matrix, you will specify the following risk rank values for each scenario:

Unmitigated: The risk level associated with that scenario before any safeguards have been put in place. Based on this risk level, the analysis team may decide on the safeguards that would mitigate the risk. To do this, the team conducts a LOPA to determine if the safeguards that are currently in place reduce the risk to tolerable levels. For example, the team may create a Risk Assessment Recommendation to recommend that a safety system be put in place. The unmitigated risk rank is stored in a Risk Assessment that is linked to the Consequence.
Mitigated: The risk level associated with that scenario after safeguards have been put in place. The safeguards lessen the risk of a hazardous scenario or prevent the scenario from occurring. Based on this risk level, the analysis team may decide that additional actions need to be taken to further mitigate the risk. The mitigated risk rank is stored in a Risk Assessment that is linked to the Safeguard.

To assess the risk associated with a scenario, you will create the following records:

A Risk Assessment record, which will store the unmitigated risk rank value and is linked to the Consequence. The unmitigated risk rank value indicates the probability and consequence of the risk if it occurs.
A Risk Assessment record, which will store the mitigated risk rank value and is linked to a Safeguard. The mitigated risk rank value indicates the probability and consequence of the risk occurring if:
- The safeguard represented by the Hazards Analysis Safeguard is in place to mitigate the risk.
- The safeguard is also an independent layer of protection (IPL).

When you create the Risk Assessments, if the Hazards Analysis for the current analysis is associated with a specific site, the Risk Assessment interface will display the Risk Matrix that is associated with that site. If the analysis is not associated with a specific site, the default Risk Matrix will be used.

Note: See the Overview of the Risk Matrix section of the documentation for additional options when working with the Risk Matrix.