Risk assessment and land-use planning regulations in France following the AZF disaster

After the disaster of AZF plant in Toulouse on 21 September 2001 (31 people killed, 3000 injured and 3 billion dollars of damage), France adopted a new law relative to safety reports and land-use planning on 30 July 2003. This law asks for the investigation of all representative scenarios and the assessment of their probabilities to demonstrate the acceptable level of safety of an industrial facility. Therefore significant changes were introduced in the way of doing risk analysis in France and some difficulties were found for the implementation of a probabilistic approach. This paper presents the new approach of risk analysis established by the French Ministry of the Environment, and particularly focuses on: the benefits and limits of the semi-quantitative probabilistic assessment method; the benefits and difficulties to use a quantitative probabilistic assessment method; some learning from the risk analysis approaches carried out in the nuclear industry; some discussion about the national matrix to appreciate the gravity of human consequences from an accident outside facilities. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.