Flooding of industrial facilities. Vulnerability reduction in practice

Agnès Vallee (1) , Bastien Affeltranger (1) , Christophe Duval (1)

1 INERIS - Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques

International databases such as OFDA and CRED show that floods accounted for more than half of disasters registered for the 1990-2001 period Worldwide. With conséquences of climate change largely unpredictable at local level, future statistics are not likely to show any improvement. As human activities historically developed in river areas and floodplains, industrial facilities are structurally exposed to flooding. ARIA is a database maintained by BARPI, a service of the French Ministry of Ecology, reporting most of major industrial accidents occurring in the country - as well as a sélection of accidents occurring abroad. In January 2008, the French Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks (INERIS) performed an analysis of ARIA data. Results show that less than 3 % of accidents (133 events out of 5050) were caused by one or more natural hazards (e.g. flooding, storm, earthquake...). At first glance the susceptibility of countries to expérience natural-technological hazards (NaTech) appears, in average, rather low.

Keywords: FLOODING; INDUSTRIAL FACILITIES; NATECH; SAFETY BARRIERS; VULNERABILITY REDUCTION

Domains: Earth Sciences; Environmental Sciences

Agnès Vallee, Bastien Affeltranger, Christophe Duval. Flooding of industrial facilities. Vulnerability reduction in practice. 13. International Symposium on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industry, Jun 2010, Bruges, Belgium. pp.389-396. ⟨ineris-00973563⟩