379 A publication of CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS The Italian Association VOL. 31, 2013 of Chemical Engineering Online at: www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Eddy De Rademaeker, Bruno Fabiano, Simberto Senni Buratti Copyright © 2013, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l., ISBN 978-88-95608-22-8; ISSN 1974-9791 Indicators for Assessing the Quantitative Effects of External Safety Policy Jacques van Steen*a, Brechje Biemansb, Jan Heckmanc, Sjoerd Posta, Luc a Vijgen aDCMR Environmental Protection Agency, PO Box 843, 3100 AV Schiedam, the Netherlands bProvince of Noord-Brabant, PO Box 90151, 5200 MC Den Bosch, the Netherlands cProvince of Zuid-Holland, PO Box 90602, 2509 LP Den Haag, the Netherlands
[email protected] The fireworks disaster at the Dutch city of Enschede in the year 2000 has stimulated activities in the area of external safety at the national, regional and local level in the Netherlands. New legislation was developed, and adequately implementing this new legislation as well as increasing the quality of carrying out existing legislation became an important issue. This concerned in particular the provinces and munici- palities, being the competent authorities for environmental regulation, and also the so-called safety regions as the competent authorities for disaster and fire brigade regulation. In order to facilitate the necessary activities at the regional and local level, the national government has provided the provinces with sub- stantial resources since 2004, which were to be spent through provincial programs and distributed over all parties involved on the basis of well-defined projects. Over the years, indicators have been developed for assessing the effectiveness of these programs at regional and local level (IPO, 2009).