The Corps defines risk assessment as "a systematic, evidence-based approach for quantifying and describing the nature, likelihood and magnitude of risk associated with the current condition and the same values resulting from a change condition due to some action."

Risk assessment is step one in the risk analysis process. The goal of this step is to gather the information and do the analytical work necessary to make decisions and solve problems.

Risk assessment is the work you need to do to answer the following questions:

• What can go wrong?
• How can it happen?
• How likely is it?
• What would the consequences be?