Product Summary

The iOiQ Facility Initial Risk Screening Tool (ioFIRST) is a model developed to assist organizations with prioritizing the order in which PHAs are conducted. It is a hazard identification and first-level risk screening tool that addresses health, safety, and environmental hazards from acute, episodic releases of hazardous materials; especially those with potential for impact off-site.  ioFIRST will be used primarily to determine the initial rank ordering of site or unit hazards related to fixed facilities. It should not be used to perform quantitative risk assessment. ioFIRST includes simplified hazard models, adjustments based on age, incident history,  surrounding populations, and a method of combining the scores associated with each unit or site.

ioFIRST was developed to meet the need for a hazard identification and initial screening tool to be applied to fixed facilities. During the course of development a number of different decisions and compromises were made, usually regarding options involving algorithms, data availability, clerical effort required to operate the system, and programming complexity. The goal has always been to develop a reasonable, user-friendly risk ranking model which balances the need for simplicity, with the requirements to be accurate, within the limitations of a first screen tool.

The function of the ioFIRST score is to enable comparisons of relative hazards both within and across different sites, and ranking of those process units and sites according to their potential to cause major public emergencies involving episodic chemical releases. The relatively more hazardous process units and sites can be identified for subsequent risk screening. Certain nominal risks may be dismissed after initial screening while others will be so clearly unacceptable that the company will want to move immediately from screening to implementing specific risk-mitigation measures.

ioFIRST is by no means all-inclusive of all conceivable hazards and their ramifications. It does, however, consider the more common, as well as particularly dangerous, hazards that a facility handling chemicals may experience. Results are conservative in that scores are determined for the largest amount of each chemical that could be accidentally released, regardless of the likelihood of such a release.

Requirements

ioFIRST runs on any Windows-compatible computer and requires about 2MB hard disk space. It will take advantage of the following hardware if present: a mouse, a color monitor, extended memory, and a math co-processor.