Seveso sites in Germany

Communities Deutschland (Germany)
1

In Belgium, Luxemburg and France, it’s quite easy to find data about which sites have so called “Seveso risks” (i.e. industrial sites that need to follow the Seveso-III directive. For Germany (in particular the Lander bordering Belgium), I could only find such data for Saarland. It’s my understanding the directive includes an obligation to inform the public, but it seems that responsibility is fractured in Germany. It appears data is very hard to come by.
I also had a look at the seveso key in OSM in Germany, but it doesn’t appear to be used.
Are you familiar with data sources for this topic? Is there some other key in use in Germany to indicate these facilities

2

:wink: Maybe we Germans are too much used to the phrase “Seveso is everywhere”

A search vor “seveso” in the osm-wiki does not show much results. so it seems unlikely.

The Tag:seveso=seuil bas and Tag:seveso=seuil haut pages of our wiki are pretty useless copy-paste-style documentation.

The english terms can be found at:

or directly at:

Directive - 2012/18 - EN - Seveso III - EUR-Lex
under “Article 3, Definitions”

Looking at the taginfo values for the key “seveso”

OSM key values         Google Translate           en.WikiPedia
Lagedrempelinrichting  Low-threshold facility  -> lower-tier
Hogedrempelinrichting  High-threshold facility -> upper-tier
seuil bas              low threshold           -> lower-tier
seuil haut             high threshold          -> upper-tier

we might want to unify them with the English terms.

Back to your original question, and looking for a source of that info i only found eSPIRS and the copyright note does not look promising:

It also has an excuse for some lack in transparency:

3

Yes, this is a really big problem for this area. Seveso III is implemented in Germany with the so-called ‘Major Accidents Ordinance’ (Störfallverordnung), an amendment to the Federal Immission Control Act (Bundesimmisionsschutzgesetzes). The federal states are responsible for its implementation.
According to the Federal Environment Agency, there are currently 3,800 so-called “Störfall-Betriebe” throughout Germany. As a rule, the federal states must publish a monitoring plan.
In addition to the eSPIRS already mentioned, I am familiar with the following documentation:

4

Just in case this isn’t obvious; if you have to do extensive online
research to find out whether a certain tag might apply to a given
industrial site then it might not be a tag that should be in OSM at all.

OSM’s strength is that mappers can go out and survey stuff, fix errors
the notice with their own eyes, and so on. That’s why our data quality
is often better than what competitors have. Importing government data
where the government data is authoritative and OSM mappers cannot, ever,
conceivably improve the data, adds “foreign objects” to OSM and should
only be done after extensive consultation in the community.

6 Likes
5

For Saarland, there’s actually some easy to use open data available (CC BY 4.0)

1 Like
6

Here I must clearly disagree.
Seveso III facilities are clearly important for reasons that may also be of importance to the general public at some point. Precisely because it is only through this information that the protection of health, the environment and property can be better guaranteed.
This is precisely why I consider it important that such information can also be presented in qualitative terms via OSM.
In the end, the respective operator must publicly inform about the conditions according to Seveso III (at least in Germany) on their websites and other data.