United States Department of Transportation
i
Hazardous Materials Transportation in Tank Cars: Analysis of Risks, Part II
-
1995-01-01
[PDF-6.46 MB]
Details:
-
Creators:
-
Corporate Creators:
-
Corporate Contributors:
-
Subject/TRT Terms:
-
Publication/ Report Number:
-
Resource Type:
-
Geographical Coverage:
-
Corporate Publisher:
-
Abstract:The work indicated in this report forms the second phase effort to evaluate the overall risks to the population from the rail transport of certain chemicals. Most of the chemicals studies exhibit one or more hazards such as inhalation toxicity (vapors), flammability (thermal radiation hazards) and explosivity (causing blast wave damage hazard). A few of the chemicals pose potential hazards from the tendency to self-heat due to initiation of polymerization reaction caused by loss of inhibitor or by exposure to an external fire. These various hazardous behaviors have been modeled and the risks (in terms of probabilities of occurrence of hazardous events and people exposure hazards) have been evaluated. It is seen that the overall probability of occurrence of a self-heating induced thermal explosion type accident is rare. The hazardous effects of an explosion of this type has limited range (<200 m) and consequently the people exposure values are relatively small (1 to 50). However, a great uncertainty exists in the value of the parameter which represents the fraction of the mass of chemical in the tank car which undergoes thermal explosion. In this report, a value of 1.5% is used. Risk analysis results for toxic, fire and explosion hazards indicates that transportation in DOT 105 tank cars is at best a factor of 10 safer that the transportation in DOT 111A type tank cars.
-
Format:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
