Assessing the consequences of pipeline accidents to support land-use planning

•Accidents in pipelines may imply consequences on people, equipment and environment.•Land-use planning is essential to reduce risk in pipelines, mainly in urban zones.•The most frequent cause of accidents is third party activities, mainly excavation.•Fires, followed by explosions are the most frequent accident type in pipelines. With the rapid development of industry, the number of pipelines that are proposed or under construction is increasing year by year, connecting different regions of a country and, more and more, different countries. Thus, an accidental loss of containment from a pipeline involves a certain risk, which could imply potential consequences on people, equipment and environment. Therefore, the existence in some places of a large net of pipelines has a clear influence on land-use planning, especially in the ones with intense activities, which usually are the inhabited zones. In this paper, a historical analysis is performed on a sample of 1063 accidents that occurred in onshore pipelines, to illustrate the risk associated to these systems and its significance in land-use planning.