Three days after the fire of a chemical plant in Rouen, the Minister of the Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire spoke on the subject Sunday. He said he wanted to "guarantee the health security of the inhabitants" in the long term, learning from this incident.

The Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire said Sunday it would be "useful" to review the rules for the establishment of sensitive plants, after the fire on Thursday Lubrizol chemical plant in Rouen. "Having Seveso factories that are almost nested in a city, we would not do that today," said Bruno Le Maire on the set of the Grand Jury of RTL and LCI.

"Guarantee the health security of the inhabitants"

"The urgency today is to guarantee the health security of the inhabitants of Rouen, afterwards, let's make a feedback, that we look at what lessons should be learned from the plant locations, from the factories at risk, on topography of all plants across the territory, why not, I think it could be useful, "he said.

The entire @gouvernementFR takes the situation seriously at #Rouen. We do daily monitoring of the situation, hour by hour, to ensure the total health security of the inhabitants. # # LeGrandJurypic.twitter.com Lubrizol / xNZ5yZMYJv

- Bruno Le Maire (@BrunoLeMaire) September 29, 2019

Several residents, associations or unions have expressed since Thursday their concern or their anger, while the chemical plant Lubrizol, an industrial site Seveso high threshold, is located in the city of Rouen, about three kilometers from the famous cathedral .

More than 1,300 Seveso sites in France

Seveso sites are classified according to two levels of risk, high threshold and low threshold, depending on the amount of hazardous materials present. According to the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition, France has 1,312 Seveso classified sites (including 705 high) to date. At the end of 2015, during the last census, France had 1,261 (700 high).

Angry farmers

Bruno Le Maire, formerly Minister of Agriculture from 2009 to 2012, also stressed that it would "seem normal" to compensate the losses of farmers in the region of Rouen, "for those who would not have been insured" . Around Rouen farmers were hit hard with a "freeze" of crops and crops likely to have been exposed to soot "until obtaining health guarantees," said Saturday the prefect of Normandy Pierre-André Durand.