Seveso sites, ammonitrates storage… Have the lessons of the explosion been learned?

On September 21, 2001, a stock of 300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, used in the production of nitrogenous fertilizers, exploded on the Toulouse site of the AZF plant. This industrial disaster was the cause of the death of 31 people, 2,500 injuries and enormous material damage. An accident which was also revealing for the French population of the industrial risks of the factories in operation near their homes.

And which will lead in July 2003 to the Bachelot Law which provides for the establishment of technological risk prevention plans for companies classified as high threshold Seveso. In addition to risk reduction at source and hazard studies, it also enacts town planning rules aimed at regulating construction around the 700 sites at major risk.

Progress with PPRTs, but …

A regulation that took a long time to put in place. But which made it possible to change things within the factories themselves, according to the Director General of Risk Prevention. “Originally, they concerned exclusively the exterior of the site, now they include a new phase of risk reduction at source. Operators had to invest in order to comply. We have often cited the spheres of LPG that we had removed between the buildings of Lubrizol and the hydrochloric acid storage “, noted
Cedric Bourillet, during his hearing by the Senate after the fire at the Rouen factory.

“For industry, for chemicals, this has resulted in the investment of more than 500 million euros to strengthen our facilities and improve the prevention of technological risks”, completed in front of the deputies Philippe Prudhon, the Director of Technical Affairs of France Chimie. Adding that “zero risk does not exist”, but that everything was done to “come as close as possible”.

A finding that residents of Seveso sites do not always share. Serge Baggi lives near the Fondeyre oil site in Toulouse. Former AZF employee, he knows the importance of hazard studies. “But it is the industrialist who does it. Especially since we use a probabilistic method, which puts the risk into perspective, ”underlines the president of the Minimes neighborhood committee. For him, all this “lacks transparency”. Proof of this is that he is still waiting, two years after the derailment of a train carrying fuel, for the expert reports that he requested during a Site Monitoring Commission (CSS), these bodies created by law. Bachelot.

To this is added another pitfall, according to him, that of training employees in industrial risk. “Within companies, the Health and Safety and Working Conditions Committee was the body that looked into these issues. But with the end of the CHSCT, it is more difficult to keep an eye on the grain. Not to mention the subcontracting on industrial sites, which is a real disaster ”, assures the one who was rapporteur of the commission of inquiry of the committee of health, safety and working conditions of AZF.

According to the Institute for an Industrial Safety Culture, created in 2003, studies carried out over the past two decades “have shown that there is no one-way impact of subcontracting on safety”. According to this association, which works to improve safety in companies, it can have both positive and negative effects. “There are ways of progress to compensate for these negative effects, such as cooperation and sharing of the safety management system between the principal and the service provider. The objective is to develop a common safety culture between the principal and the subcontractor ”, insists the Institute that worked on the question through interdisciplinary working groups.

Regulation, but not enough controls

After Lubrizol, the Minister of Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili had announced that she wanted to strengthen the requirements for the storage of hazardous materials and make systematic inspections of all classified installations located within a radius of 100 meters around Seveso sites.

A breakthrough but which, for some specialists, come up against the issue of staffing to achieve it. The minister announced that this measure would be accompanied by a 50% increase in inspectors. “With a 50% increase in controls, there will still be fewer inspections in France than in 2007. To verify the compliance of the 500,000 ICPEs in five years, it would be necessary to go from 1,600 inspectors today to 9,000. We are very far from the account, argued the citizen collective Notre Maison Burns.

Among its active members is Paul Poulain. Consultant specializing in fire safety and industrial risk management, he has just published Everything can explode published by Fayard editions. “If the number of inspections of hazardous sites had increased a lot just after AZF, to 30,000 per year in 2006 for some 500,000 hazardous industrial sites listed in total, it fell to 18,000 in 2019,” he recently told AFP.

While the issue of controls remains crucial, that of ex post facto investigations has made progress. Called for by parliamentarians, the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on Industrial Risks (BEA-RI), like the one that exists in aviation, was created. Assigned to carry out technical investigations and “draw lessons in order to avoid the recurrence of accidents”, he has already intervened in the field. In particular on a fire in a breeding of Petit-Mesnil where there was a stock of ammonitrates.

Storage of the ammonitrates in question

In his report, he “recommends that the regulatory authorities study the feasibility of specifying in the regulations which apply to agricultural installations the good practices to be applied in the event of storage of fertilizers”. In France, thousands of farmers thus store this nitrogen fertilizer at home, at the origin of the explosion of AZF or, more recently, of the port of Beirut. And despite the dangerousness of this product, they have no obligation to declare it if their stock does not exceed 250 tonnes.

“Between June 15 and September 15, 2021, from Pas-de-Calais to Gers, at least six agricultural sheds containing both ammonium nitrate-based fertilizers, hay, straw, fuel oil, tarpaulins, tires caught fire, ”draws up the Robin des Bois environmental protection association, which calls for a ban on storing these ammonitrates with other incompatible products.

An opinion shared by Friends of the Earth who wants to take the subject from another angle. “France is the leading consumer of ammonium nitrate in Europe. However, this is not a necessity, we can do otherwise to reduce the use of these chemicals in agriculture, in particular by using organic fertilizers, an advantage for the agricultural transition and which would allow an effective response to both the question. stocks and pollution ”, concludes Manon Castagné, fertilizer campaign manager within the association.


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