In Toulouse, industrial accident simulation in the ArianeGroup plant, classified as “Seveso high threshold”
You may hear a siren sounding at 9:30 a.m. this Thursday. She will be detained from the Arianegroup plant on Île du Ramier, in Toulouse. A Seveso classified site “high threshold”, or the highest alert level for industrial sites. This means that there are major industrial risks associated with the handling, manufacture, use and storage of hazardous materials.
An exercise in real conditions
The population is not solicited, within the framework of this exercise: only for the emergency services, the police, the prefecture and the operator, ArianeGroup. Of course, the town hall will also be mobilized, with the activation of a crisis unit in particular, which will inform the mayor, Jean-Luc Moudenc, in real time. The ability to inform residents via their mobile phone will also be tested.
So, fire, explosion, release of toxic product into the Garonne or into the air? Impossible to know which scenario of the special intervention plan was retained by the prefecture, nor the number of people mobilized. Indeed, the organization must be tested as much as possible by surprise, to be as possible in real conditions.
Significant risks
All the participants contacted repeat it: it is not because there is a risk that they do this exercise, it is because the law obliges them to do so, every 3 years. However, there are risks.
On this island, in the center of increasingly populated Toulouse districts, ammonium perchlorate is manufactured in particular. A hazardous material that is involved in the composition of the fuel to launch Ariane rockets.
Accidents, this factory, located less than 5 kilometers from the Capitol, in an already known. In 2007, the plant was still state-owned when a hydrochloric acid leak formed a large white cloud. This occurs when the plant has already reduced its activities from AZF from which it is separated by the Garonne. No more manufacturing of phosgene, a very dangerous gas, only 87 employees now have on site instead of 600 previously and 20 million euros have been released to acquire the site.
But these measures do not seem sufficient to Antoine Maurice, leader of environmentalists, in opposition to the Toulouse city council. “We can no longer accept that factories at such a level of risk are in the heart of such a city”, he hammers. Environmentalists are asking for a strengthening of controls but also of “move high-risk factories outside of urbanized areas”. A request similar to that of residents of the Fondeyre plant, north of Toulouse.