Waste disposal facilities fires: prevention and management. the veneto region experience

Fires in waste disposal plants are increasingly taking into account the constantly growing statistics and their impact on communities. The danger scenarios connected to these atypical fires require a special effort and the implementation of the best prevention and mitigation techniques, pending legislative and shared actions on a national and international perspective. The statistics are constantly updated, given the number and variety of fire scenarios affecting the industrial waste management sector and this work provides an initial framework on fire statistics for the disposal of waste that has emerged in recent years. The data is used to support and guide the best actions aimed at preventing and controlling these scenarios. To try to standardize the risk analysis in this sector which presents a strong heterogeneity caused by the treated substances and by the treatments carried out, an attempt was made to provide an index method to be used as a support in risk management and capable of providing a methodology to establish the intervention priorities to implement preventive and mitigative actions to reduce risk. On this topic, a coordinated working group based in the Veneto Region has allowed the collection of updated statistics on waste disposal plants. The data have been classified to support the development of the most appropriate regulatory frameworks and have a common working base for future implementations of the tools. On the basis of the data reported, a package tool has been proposed for the identification and categorization of risks in order to provide a preliminary assessment of the most dangerous and vulnerable installations.