Chemically hazardous facilities are facilities (whether they are laboratories, institutions or enterprises) that are a place of storage, processing, use or transportation of hazardous chemicals that could be harmful to the health of the surrounding population. Moreover, the amount of transported substances to chemically hazardous objects exceeds the threshold value, and when they are destroyed, people, animals and the environment as a whole can be infected. Chemically hazardous facilities are enterprises of the chemical, oil refining, meat and dairy, food industries, bases and cold storage plants with refrigeration units located on them, in which ammonia is used. In addition, chemically hazardous facilities are water treatment and pulp and paper enterprises, which use chlorine in the course of their work, as well as ports and
railway stations on which there are tracks where rolling stock with chemically hazardous substances is located. Also, absolutely any transport applies to this type of objects - whether it be a bicycle or an airplane that carries chemically dangerous goods. Chemically hazardous objects are also institutions of a scientific, medical or educational type, which have their own chemical laboratory. You can add here also warehouses, bases and other premises storing pesticides, and landfills on which chemically hazardous substances and other industrial waste are “resting”. The most commonly used at such hazardous facilities are
acids (nitric and sulfuric), hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, carbon disulfide, chlorine and other
chemicals.
Classification of chemically hazardous objects can be carried out according to various criteria:
- toxicity;
- quantity;
- technology for storing emergency chemically hazardous substances;
- production characteristics (producing or consuming accidentally chemically hazardous substances).
Chemically hazardous objects are also divided into 4 classes.
| Classes | The number of people entering the infection zone during a chemical accident (thousand people) | The radius of the sanitary protection zone surrounding the object (in meters) | Percentage of the population that nevertheless becomes infected in the zone of the alleged chemical infection |
| 1st | more than 75 | 1000 | more than 50 |
| 2nd | 75-40 | 500 | 50-30 |
| 3rd | less than 40 | 300 | 30-10 |
| 4th | 0 | 100 | less than 10 |
Characterization of chemically hazardous objects does not give comforting information about their safety. Any
accidentally chemically hazardous substance can easily "invade" the environment, causing massive poisoning among the population. And it turns out that they thus harm the outside world due to the physicochemical and toxic properties of these substances. The most important and decisive importance here are such properties as flash point, flash, boiling and freezing,
aggregate state, corrosiveness, solubility, viscosity, density, heat of vaporization, volatility,
diffusion coefficient, hydrolysis and saturated vapor pressure. But there are many other properties that also play an important role in the "life" of these dangerous substances and, as a result, 0 in the life of people.