DEVELOPMENT OF A TOOL TO PRESENT THE EXTERNAL EMERGENCY PLANNING ZONES IN BELGIUM

The article 11 of the Seveso II Directive (1996) requests that member states has to draw up external emergency plans around major hazard plants. It is also required that the industrialists send to the competent authorities the necessary information. This information is especially the delimitation of the territory around the major hazard plants, which could be involved in case of major accident.

In Belgium, the federal authorities published the Ministerial Decree of 20 June 2008 which gives guidelines to delimitate this territory in three zones: the zone of immediate danger, the risk zone, the zone of attentiveness.
This Decree classifies accidents in three categories: those which require the delimitation of zone according to a computation of dangerous effects ranges, those which require the delimitation of zone according to conventional distances and finally those which don't require any delimitation. For the first type, the Decree provides different hypothesis to realise the computation. However this document doesn't give the way that the results have to be presented.

This paper proposes a tool developed to efficiently present the delimitation of the territory which could be involved in the case of a major accident. This tool is in the form of Microsoft Excel files. These files automatically generates the files according to the type of the installation and the substance concerned.
The file summarized a lot of information especially the characteristics of the installation (volume, temperature, pressure ...) and the characteristics of the dangerous substances. A part of the file is dedicated to the dangerous effect ranges obtained by the simulation. Those results are calculated with the DNV software Phast 6.6. A part of this file contains an aerial photo of the major hazard plants on which the effect distances are represented by a curve.
The tool was already applied for several project and contracts with the Belgian authorities and many industrialists in Walloon Region.