GIS based emergency management tool for road and rail transport of hazardous materials

An emergency occurring while transporting a hazardous substance may have a rather high-risk potential, depending on the amount of transported product, on its hazardous characteristics and on the features of the surrounding environment. This paper addresses road and rail transport of hazardous materials, with the objective of outlining some guidelines and providing a tool for the management of transport emergencies. An effective management of a transportation emergency derives from a careful balance of the opposite needs for the immediate availability of the information and its reliability. The procedure here proposed suggests to divide the data of concern into product-related information and environment-related information, estimating in advance the impact zones for some reference scenarios. By including all product related information into a database and all territorial information in a GIS (Geographic Information System) application, and combining the two, a fast and powerful tool for transport emergency management is obtained.