Emerging Good Maintenance Practices in Italian Seveso Sites: Analysis of Experiences from an Industrial Case Study and from a National Near Miss Repository

In Italy, industrial establishments with major-accident hazard are subjected to Seveso Directive to ensure effective safe conditions. This necessity also leads involved companies to regularly record accidents and near misses, even reported during the periodic inspections carried out by the competent authorities. The analysis of these data typically points out a significant role of maintenance activities. Previous field investigations also showed that several high-risk industrial sites are more and more trying to refine and improve their maintenance habits, even by the introduction of new methodologies and dedicated software, increasingly based on the use of modern and interactive technologies. The present work therefore aims to analyse new and efficient maintenance practices currently emerging in the Seveso industries, to start identifying good practices to be shared in the field for increasing safety. For this purpose, two activities are carried out in parallel. Firstly, an Italian LPG storage is taken as case-study where new recently applied maintenance procedures are analysed. At the same time, a wide range of near miss events is extracted from an Italian national near miss repository (EsOpIA). These events are analysed in aggregate form, to describe and quantify the role of maintenance procedures in occurrence, managing and prevention of near misses and accidents in a wide variety of major-accident hazard establishments, especially in order to verify the actual potentiality of the study on a large scale.