Major accident hazard and land-use planning: Difficulties in law requirements rendering and real application to existing overexploited areas

摘要

One of the aims of Seveso II Directive is to grant safe and coherent land use in areas exposed to major accidents risk coming from industrial plants. The main rules for land use planning have been coded in the Italian Decree dated May 9, 2001 having title "Minimum safety requirements for civil and industrial land planning in area affected by major accidents risk". Objective of the above mentioned national regulation is to give guidelines in land use starting from the concept that the building of residential areas or "sensible receptors" too near to Seveso II classified companies have to be forbidden or discouraged, and compatibility have to be verified trough the use of proper matrices basing on vulnerability classes, risk ranking, etc. Paper will present some difficulties raised during the application of the guidelines to existing overexploited areas located in Italy where many different interconnected process companies are grouped near towns. To help all the figures involved in land use planning an advanced Decision Support System having GIS features and specific groupware functionalities has been built on a software engine based on user-defined Best Available Techniques, Compatibility Matrices and Case-Based Reasoning.