Emeregency Management (Basic Quantitative Methods) - Essay Example

Since health effects are included in the scope of consequences, then it may be said that as per ASME specifications, severity of injuries would have been included as part of the assessment of risk as early as the asset characterization stage. Other ASME literature makes further reference to severity, this time in direct relationship to fatality or injury, an illustrates with a table of “severity ranking”. In this ranking scale, S5 (“Very High”) specifies “offsite fatalities and multiple onsite fatalities”; S4 (“High”) is the “severity rank for the possibility of onsite fatalities as well as offsite injuries”; S3 (“Medium”) is allocated to the absence of “fatalities or injuries anticipated offsite, but with the possible widespread onsite serious injuries.

” S2 (“Low”) is designated for “onsite injuries that are not widespread but only in the vicinity of the incident”; and S1 (“Very Low”) is associated with “possible minor injury onsite; no fatalities or injuries anticipated offsite” (ASME, 2006:28). Such a ranking would lead one to reason, therefore, that indeed RAMCAP would allow for the consideration of severity of injuries anticipated in a possible incident. Smith (2006, April), presenting the case for the U.S. Department of Homeland Securities, is inclined to agree with the ASME.

On the other hand, a more careful reading of the Cox (2008) article, as already mentioned, specifically stated RAMCAP does not consider severity of injuries (p.1750), although it does allow for the “severity of possible adverse consequences” (p.1755). Cox argues that there are serious limitations of “severity” in the RAMCAP model, which essentially requires the estimation of all factors in quantitative terms. First limitation is that there is “no objective certainty-equivalent for uncertain