Environmental vulnerability in the proximity of Seveso installations

Seveso II Directive on the control of major accident hazard involving dangerous substances1 introduced some important novel concepts concerning risk management policies, domino effects, area risks, and land use planning. In particular, this last issue requires the vulnerability of the environment in the proximity of a Seveso installation to be defined and assessed. Previous work on environmental vulnerability seems unsuitable to effectively characterize the whole environment, being focused on particular targets, or too simplified to provide a good picture. The present work defines an a priori vulnerability (APV), characteristic of environment and independent of the presence of the hazardous installation, and a major hazard vulnerability (MHV) which depends both on the characteristics of the environment and on the hazard presented by the installation. All types of environmental targets are considered, including human beings, other living organisms (both plants and animals), the natural environment, such as lakes, rivers, underground waters, woods and forests, etc., and the built-up environment, such as buildings, roads, rails, industrial installations, etc. In order to develop a tool for assessing the environmental vulnerability, both easy to use and fast in its response, the proposed approach makes use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which allow to obtain most information relevant to the targets from commercial databases; other data can be added in the form of plans or tables. A preliminary test of the methodology has been performed on an industrial area in Italy, using ArcView GIS2, Corine3 and TeleAtlas4 databases and Istat5 population data