The major fire at the Lubrizol and Normandie Logistique sites was an exceptional event. It challenged industrial and public prevention and precautionary measures, and generated unprecedented pollution linked to the combustion of numerous chemicals, likely to lead to as yet little-documented “cocktail” effects. An accident of this complexity calls for a multidisciplinary approach to identify all the phenomena involved.
Aware of this challenge and wishing to fully exercise its social responsibility, URN developed the COP HERL project. This has mobilized researchers from some fifteen laboratories, bringing together chemists, health specialists, experts in combustion, natural environments and human behavior. Over a three-year period (2020-2023) and with a budget of 1.3 million euros, the project received financial support from the Normandy Region, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Rouen Normandy Metropolis.
The originality of the COP HERL project lies in the synergy of these disciplines around common objectives: to characterize fire and its potential consequences on the environment and human health; to analyze risk perception and crisis management; and, ultimately, to assess the resilience of the territory in the face of industrial risk.
Working Group 1
Fire characterization
This working group, made up of members of the COBRA, CORIA, GPM and SMS laboratories, had a triple objective: to simulate the dispersion and downwash of particles present in the smoke plume; to analyze, in a non-targeted way, the contaminants present in the soot generated during the accident; and to study, using multi-residue methods, the gaseous fraction emitted and collected during the fire.
Coordinator :
Béatrice Patte-Rouland (UMR 6614 CORIA)
Keywords: fire markers; plume modeling
Working Group 2
Contamination of environmental matrices
This working group, made up of members of the COBRA, ECODIV, M2C and SMS laboratories, proposed the installation of measuring stations as well as sampling and coring points to characterize the impact of the contamination induced by the accident. The aim was to distinguish this contamination from the city’s urban geochemical background, understood as the chronic contamination of environmental matrices (water, soil) observed over the long term.
Coordinator :
Florence Koltalo (UMR 6014 COBRA)
and Matthieu Fournier (UMR 6143 M2C)
Keywords: exposure mapping; export flows and residence times
Working Group 3
Health and toxicity of fire products
This working group, made up of members of the GQG and LMSM laboratories, aimed to measure the toxicity of the contaminants to which the population was exposed during the fire, and to assess their potential health effects.
Coordinator :
Christelle Monteil (EA ABTE)
and Jean-François Gehanno (CHU)
Keywords: respiratory toxicity of smoke; impregnation of populations
Working Group 2
Social perceptions of fire and the resilience of affected social systems
This working group, comprising members of the CIRNEF, CRFDP, DUMG, IDEES, NIMEC, LERN, CUREJ, DYSOLAB and LASTA laboratories, set out to analyze the perception of the accident, the information disseminated, institutional communication, reactions and associated social consequences, and to study the responses of local players in positions of responsibility, notably teachers, secondary school heads and general practitioners.
Coordinators:
Arnaud Brennetot (UMR IDEES)
and Jean-Michel Coq (EA CRFDP)
Keywords: short-term crisis; regional resilience; adaptation strategies
Phase 1 (November 2020 – December 2021) of the project will focus on the urgent need to: i) identify specific fire markers that can be monitored in environmental media (soil and water) as well as in certain biological matrices; ii) diagnose people’s reactions during the crisis period.
Phase 2 (January 2022 – December 2023) will pay particular attention to: i) laboratory reproduction of the fire on September 26, 2019, to confirm the presence of the markers identified in phase 1 and their link with the event; ii) monitoring of environmental impregnation by the confirmed marker contaminants; iii) monitoring of population exposure; iv) continued investigation of the human and social consequences of the accident in the long-term post-crisis period.
The results of both phases are available for download opposite.