Risk assessment for land transportation of hazardous materials in Italy

This work presents a tool implementing the Transportation Risk Analysis (TRA) techniques capable of assessing the risk for road, rail and intermodal (road + rail) transportation of hazardous materials. To this end a risk calculation software has been developed which interacts with a specially developed Geographical Information System application and with a product database. The GIS application is based on a commercial coverage of Italian road and rail networks and provides information about accident rates, traffic flows, population and weather conditions. The database includes product-related information, such as the expected probabilities of release, of release size and of outcome cases and the corresponding impact areas. The software estimates the societal risk (F-N curves) for the route(s) and can be applied to single and/or multiple transportation activities, involving a variety of products, origins, destinations, routes and transportation modes. The TRA tool allows to easily perform operations such as: selecting the transport route and inserting the case data, comparing transportation modes and/or routes on a societal risk basis to determine the safest one; identifying the most hazardous locations along a route; assessing the risk associated to the transportation of hazardous materials in an area, a region or, possibly (provided the relevant transportation data are available) in a whole Country, to check its acceptability based on some suitable risk thresholds. As an example of application the software was used to assess the actual risk associated to land transportation of hazardous materials within an Italian region and to suggest possible mitigative actions