Lubrizol fire (Rouen, 2019)
On September 26, 2019, about 9,500 metric tons of products burned at Lubrizol and its neighbor Normandie Logistique in Rouen. No deaths, yet crops and milk held back, compensation paid by the operator, and a lesson about neighboring warehouses.
Rouen, night of September 25 to 26, 2019: a fire breaks out at the upper-tier Seveso site of Lubrizol, a maker of lubricant additives, and at its neighbor Normandie Logistique. The neighbor warehoused part of Lubrizol's products. About 9,500 metric tons burn, slightly more than half of it at Lubrizol. The black plume stretches more than twenty kilometers to the northeast, and soot falls well beyond Seine-Maritime. Nobody is killed. The cost comes from elsewhere. As a precaution, the state restricts the harvest and sale of milk, eggs and some crops in more than two hundred municipalities while tests are run. For farmers, the loss is economic, with no damage to their buildings, and their farm policies have little to grip. Compensation therefore goes through the operator's liability: Lubrizol funded a compensation scheme for farmers, then for affected shops and businesses. The question of the state of technological disaster came up at once. The 2003 regime requires serious damage to more than 500 homes made uninhabitable; a fire that leaves houses standing while it stains roofs and empties dairies fits it poorly. The other lesson concerns the neighbors. The origin of the fire is still disputed between the two sites, each pointing at the other, and the neighboring warehouse, outside the Seveso regime, held products from the classified plant. The underwriter who insures one of them in fact carries part of the other's risk. The operator's environmental liability, for its part, has to be read against its stock held off site at a logistics provider, which the operating permit did not see. Not to be confused with AZF: in Rouen, no explosion, no casualties, mostly non-physical losses and thousands of complaints over the anxiety caused.
Textbook case, in numbers. A farmer with 60 dairy cows produces 25 liters per cow per day, paid 0.38 euro a liter. His milk is destroyed for 20 days: 60 × 25 × 20 = 30,000 liters, or 11,400 euros. He adds 2,000 euros of bought feed to replace grass that could not be used. His farm policy pays nothing, for lack of physical damage. He submits 13,400 euros to the scheme funded by the operator, which pays on proof.
Lubrizol fire, Rouen fire 2019, Lubrizol Rouen, Rouen chemical fire
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