Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the proposal to prevent the recurrence of incidents of this kind has been to promote the
creation of special authorities for the regulation, monitoring and control of techno-
logical risks for occupational safety, health and the environment. In the United States,
for example, Congress has entrusted this task to special federal agencies like the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health (NIOSH) and in particular the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) who operates on the principles of the so-called whistle-
blower protection, or rigid capillaries and safety standards.
The major technological accidents occurred in the early twenty-
rst raised again
the issue of increasing environmental impact of such events. A prime example of
these accidents was the disaster occurred in Baia Mare in January 2000 with the
release in the Danube river of cyanide and heavy metals from a gold processing
plant in Romania and the subsequent poisoning of the water,
ora and fauna in vast
areas of Romania, Serbia, Hungary and Bulgaria. Another case of a serious
industrial accident was the Enschede
reworks disaster, which occurred on the
same year in a warehouse in the suburbs of the Dutch city. The explosion killed 22
people and injured about 950. Equally relevant was the explosion occurred in a
fertilizer factory near Toulouse, in France, in 2001. The explosion, according to
some reconstructions accidental, according to other sources result of an attack of
terrorists, caused 29 deaths and 2,500 serious injuries, signi
cant material damages
and serious environmental consequences.
These disasters have called into question the EU legislative framework on
environmental and industrial risks. The European Parliament has begun a review of
the Seveso II Directive, which in the meantime had been adopted in 1996. It has
thus come to the Directive 2003/105/EC, which has broadened the scope of pre-
vious directives to other potentially hazardous industrial facilities and tightened the
procedures to be taken in the event of an accident. To better monitor the possible
industrial accidents, the European Commission has therefore established a special
system of reporting and complaint, the Major Accident Reporting System (MARS)
managed by a special body, the Major Accident Hazards Bureau (MAHB). The
debate on these rules is then taken up with the progressive enlargement of the EU
Member States. The discipline of industrial risks in the enlarged Europe is one of
the central issues in the debate on technological risks at Community level.
The release of poisonous chemicals continued to be cause of recurrent emer-
gencies: major accidents occurred in these years has been the Camelford water
pollution incident, occurred in 1988 in Cornwall; the release of huge quantities of
sulfur dioxide into the environment from the Al-Mishraq sulfur plant near Mosul,
Iraq (2003); the Jilin City and the Formosa Plastics chemical plant explosions both
of them occurred in 2005 respectively in China and in Texas.
Apart from potentially catastrophic environmental impact not only of man-made
disasters, but more generally the model of global development (above all the issue
of global warming caused by emissions of CO
2
) and the increasingly tenuous
boundary between natural and technological disasters, the actual debate over these
topics is focused on whether to consider technological disasters also events such as
