Thick black smoke and a series of explosions in the middle of the night… Images of the fire in industrial warehouses in Grand-Couronne, near Rouen, are impressive. He first touched, from 4:30 p.m. on Monday, two warehouses rented by Bollore Logistics. One housed 12,000 lithium batteries, the other 70,000 tires. The fire will be contained at 11.30 p.m. by the hundred firefighters on site, before a new start, from 3 a.m., puts everyone back on deck, this time in a third warehouse nearby, belonging to the company. Ziegler and containing textile and sequins.
This new industrial accident has inevitably awakened a very bad memory among the people of Rouen. That of the Lubrizol fire on September 26, 2019, a few kilometers away and which had marked the spirits, both by its duration (12 hours) and by the quantity of chemicals which had burned (9,500 tons). This Tuesday morning, Pierre-André Durand, prefect of Seine-Maritime, wanted to be reassuring. “The results of the analyzes carried out throughout the night […] make it possible to confirm the absence of a significant concentration of substances in the air linked to the fire”, he assures in a press release. The prefecture thus justifies the decision to introduce no traffic restrictions this Tuesday in the agglomeration, nor that of closing the schools.
“Very light” communication, deplores Paul Poulain, consulting engineer for “industrial risks” at the Riskcare firmand author of anything can explode (ed. Fayard). He is answering our questions.
“No particular risk has been identified”… Should we be as confident as the prefecture of Seine-Maritime?
We can understand that the prefect wishes to reassure the population. But from there to adopting such a light, almost casual posture, it raises questions. Any fire is toxic and releases approximately 200 chemicals. But in what has burned in the last few hours, there are lithium batteries whose toxicity is well known in the industry. One of the warehouses still stored 12,000. In its press releases, the prefecture recognizes that the combustion of lithium represents a chemical risk. But she restricts it to clearance hydrofluoric acid and ensures that this substance has not been detected outside the site. It’s very light. The National Institute for Research and Security (IRSN) listing other pollutants* which can be released in the fire of lithium batteries. Furthermore, the “cocktail effect” is never taken into account. The second affected warehouse housed 70,000 tires and the third pallets and textiles. What are the consequences of mixing these fumes? It was not even said whether or not the roofs of these buildings contained asbestos.
Should we then consider this new fire as just as serious as that of Lubrizol?
This should be discussed with toxicologists. Personally, I think it can be just as serious. It is specified that the site burned this time was not classified Seveso**, like that of Lubrizol. With this idea behind it, it would be less serious. But it is not the category of a site that determines the danger of a fire. You have to look in detail at the nature of the substances that burned, but also take into account the time at which it happened. The Lubrizol fire mainly took place at night. Monday, the fire started at 4:30 p.m., just when people are in the street, picking up their children from school, starting to get out of work. We can assume that many more Rouennais were exposed to the cloud of smoke. Moreover, the fire is not yet completely extinguished. It is all the subtlety of the words used by the prefecture which does everything to hide that it is still burning this Tuesday. She says the fire is “contained”. This means that it is no longer supposed to leave a perimeter where we have managed to limit it. But it is not yet extinct and can always start again. At midnight last night, the prefecture was already saying that the fire was contained, before a third warehouse blazed at 3 a.m. Be that as it may, we must not stop there on this new industrial accident. Admittedly, the prefecture specifies that the additional measurements and analyzes will continue. It is to be hoped that the authorities will go so far as to conduct a epidemiological study monitoring, over the long term, the health of local residents.
In September 2020, the government made a series of announcements to strengthen industrial risk management, precisely to learn the lessons of Lubrizol. Have we progressed since?
Not really. There are still twenty fires that break out every day in factories in France. One of the objectives announced at the time was to increase by 50% the annual inspections of the 500,000 Installations classified for the protection of the environment (ICPE)*** French. To do this, the government had announced 50 additional inspectors by the end of the five-year term. A survey of Release, for the three years of Lubrizol, showed that the overall number of these agents has only declined since this disaster, in contradiction with the announced project. However, the number of inspections has increased slightly, but they are then less thorough.
The Lubrizol fire had also shown the weakness of the public alert systems during an industrial accident and had led to the implementation of the device EN-Alert [système d’alerte par SMS doublé d’une sonnerie stridente qui vous informe sur la conduite à tenir]. This new fire showed that we were still not up to speed on this culture of risk. Monday evening, the prefecture considered that there was no need to trigger FR-Alert. At the same time, on Facebook, municipalities around [comme Orival] invited their inhabitants to remain confined, to close the windows and not to go out under any pretext. A beautiful cacophony. Above all, the decision of the prefecture not to introduce any restriction of activities and to leave the schools open questions. The regulatory framework and prudence called for such measures. We confined the French massively during the Covid pandemic, but we don’t do it punctually on a fire of this magnitude, at least the time to extinguish it completely? The creation of an independent safety authority to steer crisis management seems necessary.
*Unusual or abusive conditions of use (overload, short-circuit, presence of an external heat source, etc.) may cause a thermal runaway phenomenon capable of generating leaks of this liquid electrolyte and a release of compounds dangerous to health, specifies the IRSN in a sheet devoted to lithium-ion batteries. Like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, formaldehyde, phosphoryl fluoride, benzene, styrene…”
** These sites present major accident risks and require maintaining a high level of prevention. 1,312 sites are classified in this way in France, including 705 at the high threshold.
*** Factories, farms, warehouses classified as such because they present risks of fire, explosion or pollution.