Rouen and Taranto

Is Rouen the "French Taranto?"  The reference is to the town in Southern Italy where pollution from the Ilva steelworks has been damaging local residents' health for years while public officials seem incapable of doing anything.

Rouen, known for the cathedral that Monet painted over and over, is in fact a heavily industrialized city with a considerable petrochemical industry.  In 2001, when a chemical plant exploded in Toulouse, the shock waves, figuratively, carried all the way to this city on the Seine.  A larger version of the same plant operates in Rouen and residents must have thought that the 31 deaths and 2,500 injured could as easily have happened there.
 
Le Monde reports that twelve of the city's petrochemical facilities are classified as "upper tier" under the E.U. Seveso Directive, a directive adopted after the tragic chemical company accident in Seveso, Italy, in 1976.  Upper tier sites are subject to stringent safety and public reporting requirements.

In the middle of January a Rouen plant started leaking methanethiol.  It's said to be harmless, but it really stinks, something like rotting cabbage or smelly socks, people say.  On January 21, many people in Rouen were overwhelmed by the stench and started getting nauseous.  And because of the wind direction, so did people across western France and as far away as southeastern England.  Yet no alarm went off and no statements came from the company involved.  Company officials only started providing information after being beseiged with demands to know what was happening.

© Charly Triballeau/AFP

A ten-year-old French law requires high-tier Seveso sites to have in place a "plan for prevention of technological risks," or PPRT (plan de prévention des risques technologiques).  Companies are required to adopt safety measures at the facility itself and protect nearby neighborhoods, if necessary, by buying up homes and businesses and clearing land.  So far none of the twelve sites has an approved plan.  Critics suggest that public officials want to avoid any action threatening the financial health of the industry that locally employes 30,000 people.

In the meantime Rouen remains a city with some of the worst air in France and with the potential for a deadly serious industrial accident.  The comparison with Taranto seems not so far fetched.