Public free availability of data and historical overview of major accidents occurred in European industrial ports

The strategic and raising importance of industrial port areas for developed countries’economies has drawn in the last years the major attention of authorities and governments both at national and European level. This is testified by the Council Directive 2008/114/EC “on the identification and designation of European critical infrastructures and the assessment of the need to improve their protection” (among them, port-related infrastructures); by Directive 2005/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council “on enhancing port security”, strictly linked to the previous Regulation (EC) No 725/2004 “on enhancing ship and port facility security”. The two last above mentioned provisions, regarding the strengthening of port security measures and conceived after 9/11/2001 events, have been adopted by the Italian law in-force with the decree “D. Lgs. 6 Novembre 2007, n. 203”. Furthermore, under the aspect of major-accident hazards control and prevention, the Italian legislation has adopted the decree “D.M. 16 maggio 2001, n. 293” with the aim of improving the safety level related to dangerous substances handling in industrial ports, in harmonization with the principles of Council Directive 96/82/EC (so called, “Seveso II” directive). Unfortunately, the two coexisting needs of port safety (major-accident hazard prevention and response plans) and port security (vulnerability analysis and protection measures) can collide under the aspect of the need of sharing relevant information, potentially exploitable by bad intentioned groups or individuals, with the population that could be affected by an industrial catastrophic event. This is particularly relevant in the case of highly complex industrial port areas grown, for historical and practical reasons, within or nearby pre-existing shipping activities, generally in a highly densely-populated context. For a better understanding of the impact that activities, carried out in industrial ports and involving dangerous substances, can potentially have on the neighbouring population, scientific and technical literature has been reviewed. On the basis of the examined literature, the present work takes into consideration some data related to “major accidents” occurred in industrial port areas, as accessible in free and publicly available form in databases, with the aim of identifying, whenever possible, their major causes and consequences in terms of fatalities, people injured and off-site effects and of finding similarities with the figures exposed in literature