The book comprises 13 chapters, preceded by a Foreword, Preface and Acknowledgements.

This book is about low probability and high risk hazardous events such as have occurred in nuclear, chemical process industries including petrochemicals, off-shore gas and oil exploration, in the past and discusses how such events can be identified and analyzed to prevent their occurrences.

The book uses systems approach in presenting safety tools and techniques besides providing a history of such disaster from the past. The book provides in-depth information to identify potential issues and methodology to assess the likelihood of occurrences of hazardous events. Costs of accidents, costs of safety and risk based economic decisions find place in the book in order to carry out capital and operating costs of preventive measures against the benefits of safety improvement.

Human factors and safety culture and human attitude have also been discussed and how these can be accounted for in developing safety regulations. New approaches such as system-theoretic process analysis, Blended HAZID, Bayesian Nets and fuzzy sets are also presented. The book is replete with several examples and case studies. The author of this book is Research Professor at Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University and Emeritus Professor Chemical Risk Management of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He has been member and chairman of the EFCE Working Party on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries and was instrumental in founding the European Process Safety Centre in 1992.

This book makes an interesting reading for all engineers who deal with risk assessment and management of industrial processes. The case studies presented are wide-ranging, informative and worth knowing for a safety engineer. This book is useful to engineering graduates and managers and designers and plant engineers.

This review has been published in Vol. 11, No. 6, November 2015 issue of the IJPE