Report - Agence canadienne d'évaluation environnementale

Assessing the risks related to the project
Lastly, the Agences de la santé et des services sociaux de la Chaudière-Appalaches
and de la Capitale-Nationale thought that the deterministic approach should be
favoured over the probabilistic approach when assessing risks (DM602, p. 53).
♦ Opinion 8 — Considering the characteristics and goals of the probabilistic and
deterministic analyses when assessing risks, the Panel is of the opinion that the
approach used by the proponent is the one recommended and largely used in this
field.
Assessing risks
The risk assessment process quantifies the risks related to the LNG terminal from two
perspectives: individual risk and societal risk. In order to determine their acceptability,
each of these types of risks can subsequently be judged against criteria established
by regulatory organizations such as the Major Industrial Accidents Council of Canada
(MIACC) 1 or the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of the United Kingdom, among
others.
Individual risk
The MDDEP explained that individual risk is assessed according to the consequence,
frequency of occurrence of a given accident and the probability that an individual be
affected. Thus, the assessment quantifies the risk of death for a person during the
year following an industrial accident, if this person lives in the same place during the
entire year 2 . In order to assess the risk associated with the project’s land facilities (the
terminal, including a berthed LNG tanker and the pipeline), and on the basis of
acceptability criteria established by regulatory organizations from around the world,
the proponent selected the criterion stipulating that the acceptable maximum risk for
the public should not have a frequency exceeding one undesirable event (often death)
every 10,000 years. According to the proponent, this criterion is the maximum
acceptable occurrence of most industrial risks for individuals who aren’t sheltered and
are thus the most exposed.
According to the same analysis, a risk is deemed negligible when it occurs once every
10 million years or more. To establish the acceptability of the individual risk, the
proponent referred to criteria proposed by the MIACC and which are still recognized
by the governments of Quebec and Canada, notwithstanding the fact that the MIACC
ceased operations in 1999. Deemed still relevant by the ministère de la Sécurité
1. Major Industrial Accidents Council of Canada, Lignes directrices sur l’urbanisme et l’aménagement du territoire
en fonction des risques, 1995, 43 p.
2. Ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs, Guide sur l’analyse de risques
d’accidents technologiques majeurs, discussion paper, 2002, 60 p.
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