The Buncefield Accident and the Environmental Consequences for Fuel Storage Sites and other Sites in the UK, Regulated under the Seveso Directive

Abstract

In December 2005 there was a major explosion and fire at the Buncefield fuel storage depot, located about 25 kms north of London. Fortunately nobody was killed but over 40 people were injured and there was extensive damage to property. Some of the tank bunds failed during the fire leading to the release of fuel and fire-fighting foam which caused pollution of the soil and groundwater. Buncefield was an upper tier establishment under the UK Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) Regulations, which implement the requirements of the Seveso II directive. The pollution of groundwater exceeded the threshold for reporting the environmental impact to the European Union. In the seven years since the Buncefield accident, the COMAH Competent Authority (CA) comprising the Environment Agency (EA), the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has worked with the UK fuel storage industry to implement the lessons learned. This paper describes the accident and the progress that has been made, including: The causes of the Buncefield accident and details of the subsequent prosecution;The environmental consequences including the continuing remediation of groundwater; The work done to develop a containment policy that defines the standards for upgrading fuel storage sites and the use of semi-quantitative risk analysis to assess the environmental risks; The progress that has been made implementing the containment policy; The actions taken by the CA to improve its performance as a regulator under the Seveso directive; Accidents at warehouses that have raised similar concerns about fire water containment. By the end of 2011, all of the fuel storage sites had an action plan, agreed with the regulators, for improving their containment to meet the standards set in the containment policy. The oil refineries are expected to have similar plans in place by 2013. These actions will take up to 15 y to complete.