A national hazard analysis and mapping for seveso establishments

Abstract

On 23 February 2009, the European Commission adopted a Communication on a Community approach on the prevention of natural and man-made disasters setting out an overall disaster prevention framework and proposing measures to minimize the impacts of disasters. All EU Member States were asked to develop national approaches and procedures to risk management including risk analyses, covering the potential major natural and manmade disasters, taking into account the future impact of climate change. Based on the European Commission guidelines, Romania is currently developing a national approach to risk assessment by taking into account nine major risk categories: floods, droughts, forest fires, earthquakes, mass displacement, Seveso industrial accidents, transport accidents involving hazardous materials, nuclear accidents, and epidemics/zoonoses. This paper will address the difficulties of hazard analyses and technological hazard mapping on a local, regional and national scale for all Seveso establishments. By using REHRA (Rapid Environment and Health Risk Assessment) as the basis for hazard analysis, all Seveso sites will receive a hazard index. By undergoing analysis for major physical effects, each site will go through a worst case scenario simulation of a major technological accident using modeling software. Using G.I.S. software, all spatial data collected from these establishments will be transferred to a WebGIS database. All spatial data will be expressed in a unitary standard according to the INSPIRE Directive which regulates natural risk zones. The resulting technological hazard map will be overlapped to the other hazard maps, thus creating a national hazard map and a starting point for the further national risk assessment