Risk Assessment and Mitigation Flashcards

Which stakeholder group is most critical to engage during the hazard identification phase of a community infrastructure risk assessment?

Answer: Local emergency management personnel and community members

Local emergency managers and community members possess site-specific historical knowledge of past hazards that technical data alone may not capture.

A coastal water treatment plant is designed with elevated critical equipment to withstand a 500-year storm surge. This design strategy is an example of:

Answer: Consequence reduction through resilience design

Elevating critical equipment reduces the consequences of flooding without eliminating the hazard, which is a resilience-based consequence reduction approach.

In risk communication for a sustainability project, the BEST practice is to:

Answer: Communicate uncertainty ranges honestly alongside risk estimates

Transparent communication of uncertainty ranges builds stakeholder trust and enables informed decision-making about risk trade-offs.

Which type of analysis examines all possible ways a system could fail and the downstream effects of each failure mode?

Answer: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

FMEA systematically identifies each potential failure mode in a system and analyzes the consequences to prioritize risk mitigation actions.

A bridge project team uses insurance and contractual indemnification clauses to address the risk of cost overruns from unforeseen soil conditions. This is an example of:

Answer: Risk transfer

Insurance and indemnification shift the financial burden of a risk from the project owner to another party, which is the definition of risk transfer.

Which Envision credit category is most directly linked to assessing and mitigating risks to community wellbeing from project hazards?

Answer: Climate and Resilience

The Climate and Resilience category in Envision specifically addresses long-term risk assessment, hazard exposure, and adaptive capacity of infrastructure.

When performing a qualitative risk assessment, a '3x3' or '5x5' risk matrix is used. What is a key limitation of this approach?

Answer: It does not provide precise quantitative probability values

Qualitative risk matrices use ordinal scales (low/medium/high) rather than precise probabilities, which limits their accuracy for comparing very different risk types.