Quantitative Fire Risk Assessment of Accommodation Area on Offshore Platforms

Accommodation area is a place on offshore platform where personnel onboard sleep and spend their off-duty time. It may include dining rooms, recreation rooms, lavatories, cabins, offices, sickbay, living quarters, kitchen, pantries and similar permanently enclosed spaces. According to The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), Kitchen is regarded as high risk area and needs particular attentions. It requires the surrounding walls of the area to be at least A-60 fire rated. The area contains cooking appliances, frying pan and other electrical facilities, which could be a source of fire on the platform. Even though, there are certain barriers to extinguish the fire and prevent it from developing into process area. NFPA 96 necessitates the use of automatic fire extinguisher for the cooking area; NFPA 13D requires all living areas, to be protected by fire sprinkler systems.Despite the clearer statements of these standards and their minimum requirements for the kitchen area, there is an ongoing debate on the necessity of applying all the standards during engineering phase of a platform in order to protect people and prevent the fire from developing into the process area.In this study Event Tree Analysis (ETA) was employed to quantitatively evaluate the risk of fire in the kitchen area. The case study was an offshore platform in the North Sea area. Automatic fire extinguishing system, water spray system, and personnel intervention were considered as possible mitigating measures. The reliability of each layer and associated risk reduction factor were then specified. The major initiating event for the fire was determined and its associated fire risk was calculated after applying different mitigating measures.The results of the study show that having three mitigating measures reduce the risk to the acceptable level; so further investment could be regarded as optional.

کلیدواژه ها:

Kitchen Area ، Event Tree Analysis ، Individual-Specific Individual Risk ، Annual Fatality Rate ، Fire Risk