TABLE OF CONTENTS ROSS B. COROTIS
Denver Business Challenge Professor University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0428, USA
E-mail: corotis@colorado.edu
Risk in the built environment, and the role of risk and risk perception in how society makes decisions are important aspects of safety for our structures and infrastructure. This chapter provides a brief presentation of inherent risks in life, of hazards that face communities, and of the limitations of economie and political realities in making decisions for low probability, high consequence future events. It begins with an introduction on the presence of risks, and then discusses the mathematical basis and codified approach to structural reliability. A definition of the aspects of risk and risk perceptions followed by issues unique to low probability, high consequence events, including small probabilities, the convolution of probability and consequence and political accountability. There is then a section on alternative decision criteria. Finally, there is a section on societal decision issues involving trade-offs, development, sustainability, inter-generational transfer, utility, discounting, probability versus uncertainty, risk versus risk perception, and political realities.
All activities involve a degree of risk, defined as occurrence of some outcome that is normally considered undesirable.1 Such outcomes could be the failure of a dam to hold the water in a reservoir following a storm, the collapse of a structure during an earthquake, the inability of a bridge to support traffic loads following a collision by a boat, etc. Although not universally accepted, the most common quantification of risk is the product of the likelihood of...
