Environmental Safety
Environmental safety (External safety) is the new term in the Omgevingswet for protecting the living environment. This safety concerns the prevention of risks to the environment from business activities involving hazardous substances or from the transport of hazardous substances. Protecting people in buildings is especially important in this, because many people spend most of the day inside. These risks must be visualized in municipalities’ environmental plans. This must take into account areas of concern and regulatory areas.
Environmental safety legislation
The Omgevingswet establishes focus areas that identify potential hazards. A focus area is an area where, without additional measures, people are not adequately protected indoors from outside impacts. There are three types of focus areas, namely:
- Fire attention areas
A fire alert area is an area in which life-threatening hazards may arise from heat radiation (fire) in the event of an accident involving hazardous materials. - Explosion alert areas
In an explosion-attention area, there is a (small) chance that a life-threatening situation may arise in the event of an accident involving overpressure. - Poison cloud attention areas
When there is a chance in an area of an accident with life-threatening danger due to a high concentration of toxic substances in the air, we speak of a poison cloud alert area.
Mitigation measures
For (part of) these areas, a municipality can include additional regulations to make a building more resistant to a fire or explosion. This is then called a regulatory area. If a municipality includes these additional regulations, additional measures are mandatory. These mitigation measures should reduce the impact of external risk in this area. In fire regulations areas there are additional requirements to prevent fire spread and in explosion regulations areas there are requirements to prevent fragmentation from broken glass.
Legislation: new regulations on environmental safety
There are new rules for dealing with external risk sources (such as rail and roadways) in new construction, for example, rail and roadways. With the Omgevingswet, more routes have been defined where areas of concern apply. In addition, the Basisnet will be expanded to include some new rail and road routes as well as attention areas for explosions. In your environmental plan, you must designate regulation areas where additional construction measures apply to ensure safety. Have you already thought about how to ensure a safe living environment for your citizens without onerous regulations that make building expensive or even financially unfeasible?
Advice for municipalities
For municipalities, we conduct risk analyses for existing and new areas. We help decide whether or not to label an area as a prescription area. This has to do with how the area is laid out. For example, we calculate the probability of an accident depending on the number of transports over the adjacent road or rail. We visualize the consequences, opportunities and risks so that a good, correct and safe solution can be chosen.
DGMR can assist in designing the regulatory areas (fire and explosion risk areas). With smart rules, this can be done at little extra cost, provided you provide the space in the environmental plan. For example, by making facades fireproof and the building envelope and glass explosion-proof.
