Purpose - Continued

DOE-STD-3014-96

consideration of consequences within a certain distance from the hazardous material

release point.

Another important consideration in the development of this standard is the focus on

analyzing the risk, as opposed to estimating the risk. This may seem to be a purely

semantic distinction, but it emphasizes that application of this standard is intended to

provide an organization (whether it be the facility operator or some cognizant safety

oversight organization) with sufficient information to make a decision about the extent to

which releases following an aircraft crash are a safety concern. It is also intended to

provide sufficient information to identify where the risk is coming from and to determine

what actions, if any, would be prudent to reduce the frequency or to mitigate the

consequences of an aircraft crash into the facility. In most cases, this does not require an

accurate estimate of the risk. Rather, it is sufficient to determine that the risk (or the

individual subelements of frequency and consequences) does not exceed a

predetermined level of concern (i.e., it is not large compared to other risks).

This standard allows the analysis to proceed along a series of increasingly complex steps;

the results at each step are used to determine whether it is necessary to proceed to the

next step or whether sufficient information has been provided and the analysis can be

stopped and documented. As one proceeds through the steps, the results will get closer

to an actual estimate of the risk, but even after fully implementing this standard, the results

will still be more conservative than would be expected from a best-estimate risk

assessment. In summary, following this standard will, in the vast majority of cases,

provide sufficient information to document facility safety and support sound decision

making for addressing the effects of an aircraft crash in the context of facility safety. In

those rare cases where additional analysis is considered necessary to achieve these

goals, an organization may perform a more detailed analysis. This standard does not

provide guidance on completing such an analysis.

A necessary corollary to the above discussion is that this is not a criterion-based standard.

It does not provide any hard and fast rules prescribing what actions should be taken in

response to the results; it does not even prescribe whether any action should be

considered. It does provide quantitative guidelines against which the results for each step