Al ENI depot in Calenzano one occurred violent explosion probably caused by dispersion of hydrocarbon vapours in the tanker loading area. Unfortunately, at the moment there are 5 victims and 26 injured but the fire has been put out. But what is the situation now? And what were the possible causes of this accident?
The reconstruction of the accident
We are at Calenzano, in the province of Florence. An important Eni industrial site is located here 170,000 square meters active since 1956 and that, from 1971, it is connected via an oil pipeline to the Livorno refinery. The deposit contains, according to the site manager, well 152,000 tons of mineral oilsespecially diesel (around 132,000 tons). Operations take place inside storage, transfer, unloading And loaded onto tankers.
The facility therefore has two key areas: one with 24 tanksin which the material is stored, and another with 10 shelters which allow the tankers to be refueled. According to surveillance videos and as also confirmed by ENI in an official note, the explosion would have occurred precisely in this last area, that of the loading shelters. A shot from a nearby surveillance camera clearly shows this indeed an exploding tanker while refueling at the shelter (which was then literally destroyed by the explosion). The explosion was accompanied by a violent attack roar, a pyre and an imposing column of very black smoke visible even from kilometers away. The roar was so loud that it was also recorded by the INGV seismograph network.
The tragedy could have been much worse if the accident had involved i tanksespecially considering the quantity of diesel stored in the area and the proximity of the depot to the railway and motorway. In any case, immediately after the accident various teams of the Fire Brigade, the police and the regional health emergency system rushed to the scene and the flames, fortunately, lasted about an hour.
In addition to the industrial site, the entire area has suffered inconvenience in the immediately following hours. THE’Calenzano exit on the A1 was closedparalyzing the motorways, given that that is one of the crucial points of the motorway network to connect southern and northern Italy. There were also problems at railway line regional, it was necessary to activate replacement buses and, obviously, all the hospitals in the area were alerted.
Possible causes of the fire at the warehouse
First we must say that We don’t have a certain answer yet and we will necessarily have to wait for the authorities to carry out the appropriate investigations. According to what was declared by the president of the Tuscany region Eugene Giani, which in turn cited what was reported by some tanker drivers, the accident would have been caused by a load defect in one of the tankers.
According to what was stated by ARPAT, that is, the Tuscan headquarters of ARPA, the accident would have been caused by one cloud of steam which developed, moved, exploded and therefore started the fire. One of the hypotheses that emerged from the first reconstructions is that these vapors of hydrocarbonstherefore highly flammablecame into contact with some type of trigger while filling one of the tankers at the rear of the shelter, thus giving rise to the explosion.
It is right to point out that systems like this are classified as “at significant industrial risk”. In total there are some in Italy 975 – as also stated by an ISPRA manager in an interview – and as such they must (or at least should) be subjected to stringent controls, as required by the European Seveso directive. The last ISPRA inspection of this site dates back to 2017 but it is possible that in the meantime inspections have been carried out by other bodies, such as the Fire Brigade.
Pollution in the area
Again during the same interview it was pointed out that the presence of smoking black indicates that they are there substances not completely burnedtherefore inside there are residues of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. In fact, generally black smoke is “worse” than white smoke precisely because it indicates incomplete combustion and therefore the presence of radicals and other toxic or polluting molecules. At the same time, as anticipated, within a few hours the flames were put out by the Fire Brigade, so the emergency was handled in a short timelimiting the quantity of harmful substances released into the environment. Surely then the wind that blew yesterday in the area helped to “keep at bay” the concentrations of pollutants and toxic substances.
Currently theHARP produced a press release in which it is said that:
Concentrations in the air at ground level were considered negligible. For these reasons, there was no need to take soil samples.
Similar communications also arrived from the Tuscany Region and from the Municipality of Calenzano itself.
There are no health risks. The concentrations in the air at ground level since the conclusion of the extinguishing operations are to be considered negligible and the fire cloud dispersed at altitude in a relatively short time
The first use of IT-Alert
A new element of the Calenzano accident is that this was the first time that IT-Alert, the national civil protection alert system which sends a notification to our cell phones in cases of disasters like this, actually came into operation. Before yesterday, in fact, the system had only sent test messages. The message reached all cell phones that were there within 5 km of the site industrial at 11.25am – so actually about an hour after the explosion.
The message contained the information essential linked to the incident, therefore the fact that there had been an accident at the Calenzano plant and that there had been a leak of dangerous substances, inviting people to find shelter indoors and not approach the plant.
