Estimating Chemical Accident Costs in the United States: A New Analytical Approach

摘要

Accidental chemical releases can have a major financial impact on an individual company or their insurer. How much they cost society as a whole is an open question. Also, estimating the size of the social and political costs of catastrophic is releases is beyond the scope of this paper. However, our study group looked at the question of how much these catastrophic releases cost in two ways. First a working group from the OECD studied the issue and produced a set of lessons learned. Their qualitative results showed that an actual total cost estimate would be difficult to determine, due to the many intangibles involved in estimating these costs, not the least of which are 1) the inability to obtain cost data and 2) disagreement over the definition of the term "major accident". The results of the OECD study were reviewed extensively in this paper. Second, an attempt was made to estimate the actual dollar value of these catastrophic releases, in the United States. It was done by backing in through an estimate of total losses at two major U.S. insurance organizations. A total loss estimate for each insured was arrived at through a manual estimate of loss data. Then, a total industry wide estimate was arrived at by backing in to the number through a market share estimate. This produced a direct cost of approximately dollar1 billion. Using an estimate developed by W. H. Heinrich that the indirect costs of accidents are approximately four times the direct costs, a total annual cost of dollar5 billion was arrived at, for U.S.-based losses only. This number is very rough and can only be considered a "scale of magnitude" approximation.