Apr 22 2009
AIR Worldwide Corporation (AIR) today announced a new service for the evaluation of catastrophe risk to industrial and energy facilities including offshore platforms and networks.
AIR's Catastrophe Risk Engineering (CRE) practice will provide corporate risk managers and insurers with detailed structural evaluations and earthquake and wind engineering services coupled with state-of-the-art risk modeling for pre-disaster planning and risk mitigation, and for post-event damage assessment and repair development.
"Recent earthquakes and hurricanes-such as the 2007 Niigata Chuetsu ] Oki Earthquake and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike-have resulted in significant property loss and downtime to numerous industrial and offshore facilities throughout the world," said Dr. Akshay Gupta, Principal Engineer and Director of the Catastrophe Risk Engineering practice at AIR Worldwide. "In today's economic environment, risk managers are under increasing pressure to make informed decisions regarding insurance purchase, retrofit investments, tradeoffs between insurance and retrofit, and other operational procedures."
Accurate evaluation of seismic or hurricane risk to industrial and offshore facilities is complex, since these facilities exhibit a large number and variety of distinct components, such as structures (buildings, platforms), machinery, equipment, transmission systems, transportation assets, and contents. Furthermore, the unique characteristics of the components at a facility, in terms of their physical condition, design criteria, and spatial location within the facility can result in seemingly similar facilities exhibiting markedly different response to catastrophes both in terms of physical damage and downtime. Involved process networks such as offshore assets connecting to undersea pipelines or tankers connecting to onshore facilities further complicate the risk analysis.
AIR's CRE practice employs a comprehensive engineering, scientific, and network approach for the assessment of catastrophe risk and the evaluation and recommendation of risk mitigation strategies for such facilities-an approach that is transparent both in the process and results for the benefit of owners, insurance brokers, and insurers.
"AIR's Catastrophe Risk Engineering services are being utilized for risk assessment, mitigation and decision making by major corporations with assets ranging from single buildings to some of the largest industrial complexes in the world," continued Dr. Gupta. "Site-specific, engineering-based risk evaluations provide reliable and defensible loss estimates for an industrial facility and facilitate decisions regarding insurance coverage, mitigation planning, emergency response planning, and determination of shutdown criteria, among others."
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