How Inspections Outcomes May Improve the Foresight of Operators and Regulators in Seveso Industries

Abstract

The Seveso III Directive 2012/18/EU was implemented by Italy in mid-2015 (D.lgs. 105/2015), and it has been applied since 2016. With the new legislation, the inspection system has been improved, in three years all Upper Tier Seveso establishments shall be inspected at least once. During the inspections, several technical documents are examined, including those containing detailed description about the accidents, incidents, near misses and anomalies recorded in previous decade at the establishment. To understand the potential of those documents, they have been organized into a repository. A method to extract knowledge from this collection has been developed to support foresights or intuitions about the safety of process industries. The paper describes the methodology and provides some cases of its application.