Major Accident Risks of HazMat Transport by Rail between Industrial Sites. A Case Study in Sicily

The presence on a territory of industrial activities where chemical substances are stored and manufactured necessarily involves the transport of hazardous substances. Transportation of dangerous goods may often involve long distances to reach the final destination or other industrial sites. In Italy there are several examples of this type of situation including the case of Sicily. In a previous work the risk due to the transport of dangerous goods in the whole island of Sicily has been analysed and evaluated, with the aim to test the risk evaluation procedure and its recent refining on a large scale, since this procedure was previously applied only for small areas (usually urban areas). Being the test successfully, this work will focus on the transport of ammonia by rail, trying to use detailed input data both for the accidental frequency and for meteorological data. This route has been chosen because local authority finds it particularly dangerous because of the obsolescence of the rail track, but unfortunately we couldn’t get historical accident data on it.