TRHAZ: A Quantified Risk Assessment Tool for Road Transport of Dangerous Goods in Italy. Prof. Barbara Mazzarotta, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184, Roma (ITALY), telephone +39-(0)6-44585-586, fax: +39-(0)6-4827453, e-mail: barbar@impchim.ing.uniroma1.it; Ing. Roberto Bubbico, GNDRCIE - National Council of Research; and Prof. Sergio Di Cave, University of Rome "La Sapienza”
TrHaz (Transportation Hazard) is a computerized quantified risk assessment program, specifically designed for a rapid estimate of the risk to which the resident population is exposed, due to the transport of dangerous goods by road. It has been developed in the framework of a research project supported by the Italian Civil Protection Department, and provides both the individual risk at geographical locations based on their distance from the route, and the overall societal risk. The program is referred to the Italian road network. At the moment TrHaz is available in a basic version, which makes use of average values of the main route related data; the final version will derive these data on a 1-km basis from a specific GIS system which is in being developed.
TrHaz makes use of well-established risk assessment methods, taking into account two different release scenarios, all the accidental events possibly arising from each scenario, and the extension of the zones where the consequences of each accidental event may be fatal to the exposed population, calculated under six reference weather conditions. These data, which are specific of the transported substance, are included in the data bank TrHazDat and are immediately available for TrHaz. This approach greatly enhances TrHaz speed, since it does not carry out the time-consuming consequence analysis step; on the other hand, this task is separately performed using specialized softwares, which ensures high reliability of the results.
The data bank TrHazDat presently contains 15 toxic and/or flammable compounds, representative of wide categories of dangerous substances. Test comparisons between the previsions of TrHaz and more accurate calculations show that TrHaz results are largely acceptable and can be used in a decision making process.
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