View from the floor: Let's get sensible about risk

"Social license.” It’s the buzzword of the moment in the mainstream media, and when you hear the term, you know one thing: someone’s trying to stop a project somewhere. Right now, the programs most likely to be stopped by a non-binding plebiscite or grassroots protest involve moving oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to the Pacific coast by the new Transmountian project, to central Canada by way of Energy East, or south by Keystone XL. If we try to move oil by rail, there are multiple communities that don’t want the traffic through their towns, especially after the Lac Megantic disaster.

The result is typically Canadian: we do nothing. What we should do is make decisions based on a sensible risk analysis and stop impressing politics on what should be an engineering process. Pipelines do rupture and when they do, the results damage the local environment. But a sensible risk management solution determines an acceptable probability of failure and engineers the solution to meet that statistically determined likelihood of a rupture. What’s the magic number? It’s technically possible to build a system to any reliability level we want, but not affordably. I think an appropriate level would be based on similar risks we experience every day, such as the likelihood of human injury by rail or air accident, in areas where a rupture would affect people directly. In uninhabited areas, a lower risk level is acceptable, perhaps accompanied by a rapid response team to cope with spills.

For decades engineers have designed critical systems using probability and desired “mean time between failures” as a legitimate strategy in safety-sensitive systems like commercial aircraft and pharmaceuticals. Occasionally planes crash and drugs have unforeseen, damaging effects, but no one argues that air travel or drug therapy should be stopped as a result. The problem is, it’s difficult to drive a mass protest over the mean time between failure of a pipeline .... it’s easier to just say ‘no’. Like it or not, Alberta and increasingly Saskatchewan-derived petroleum is going to market. A sensible form of public discourse is to compare the statistics with other life risks and find an acceptable probability of failure. We do this now, but that report is buried under a snowstorm of committee hearings, public consultation and submitted briefs. Like it or not, the mathematically-derived facts should be the final arbiter of whether a project is environmentally reasonable and adequately safe. This analysis should be delivered in weeks, not months or years, using teams drawn from industry and academe where necessary. Unfortunately, when TV cameras are on the scene, chanting protesters trump engineers every time. We need a more sensible system and we need it now.