Management system for regulatory requirements applicable to environmentally classified industrial facilities

We propose to present an approach to managing major industrial risks to the environment that we developed at Seveso high threshold sites for the storage of hydrocarbons, the manufacture of fertilisers or pyrotechnics, and at dams. The basic idea behind this approach is that these sites must demonstrate their ability to manage major risks, but that the risk analyses prove nothing until proof is provided of the truth of their premises, the logical validity of their arguments, the realism of their conclusions, and the effective implementation of the modelled risk control measures and tasks. Demonstrating risk control is therefore an ongoing process based on piloting and monitoring the correspondence between these items and the reality of industrial processes and their environments. Risk assessments are the basis, but not the complete demonstration. Is this a new idea? Certainly not. But what does seem new to us, and what we would like to present, is the risk management approach that we have built around this simple idea. The difficulty we have faced in achieving this is the implementation of a flexible digital platform, made necessary by the quantity and diversity of the data, methods, models, and regulatory requirements to be managed, and moreover by the number and diversity of the stakeholders. The design of the database came up against a major scientific obstacle, that of the diversity of representations of the various risk management stakeholders, and therefore of the different types of process for developing or using all these data, methods, models, and regulatory requirements; a source of richness but also of misunderstanding, mistrust and, ultimately, under certain conditions, of increased risk. This is the problem of the silos of expertise and disciplines in the face of the need for distributed/shared cognition to build up one database around a single and holistic risk model (a common operational picture). We would like to present the stages of our method and our Web IT tools.