Nowadays, the interest in studying the catastrophic effects of hydro-meteorological hazards on structures and infrastructures is increasing due to climate change effects. Extreme events, such as floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, pose significant risks to major-hazard industrial facilities, leading to substantial economic losses, environmental hazards, and prolonged recovery times. These events result in multi-hazard conditions, from natural and technological disasters, also known as NaTech events. Natural disasters like the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake or 2005 Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated the high vulnerability of industrial installations to natural and technological hazards, with a clear impact on the community in terms of direct and indirect damages and losses. Nevertheless, a few contributions provided a unified picture, analyzing problems, perspectives, and identifying proper methods for hazard, vulnerability, and exposure related to the effects of extreme hydro-meteorological phenomena in industrialized areas. Consequently, an overview of the problem is provided herein, where existing methods for NaTech risk assessment of industrial facilities under hydro-meteorological events are deeply analyzed, trying to frame the issue in terms of flooding, tsunamis, and storm surge, as the main causes of possible technical accidents. These latter will be critically examined, also in terms of hazardous material releases and consequences, and the relevant multi-hazard risk analysis methods will be discussed, trying to give a unitary view of a rather fragmented topic.
Paolacci et al. (Wed,) studied this question.