Flooding of industrial facilities. Vulnerability reduction in practice

International audienceInternational databases such as OFDA / CRED show that floods accounted for more than half of disasters registered for the 1990-2001 period. With consequences of climate change largely unpredictable at local level, future statistics are not likely to show any improvement. As human activities historically developed in river areas and floodplains, industrial facilities are structurally exposed to flooding. Past events witnessed industrial vulnerability to flooding, including direct impact on structure, loss of safety measures, loss of utilities, business interruption, etc. In response of such natural-technological interaction, mitigation efforts have taken two main directions: land-use planning in flood-prone areas and vulnerability reduction in flood-prone facilities. This paper focuses on the former issue and presents a methodology for the mitigation of flood impacts on industrial facilities

IS LEAF LITTER REMOVAL MORE EFFICIENT THAN LEAF LITTER SHREDDING TO CONTROL APPLE SCAB? A FIRST ANSWER IN A COMMERCIAL ORGANIC ORCHARD

In organic apple orchards, sanitation practices are a keystone of a sustainable scab management. Because the suppression of the inoculum by leaf litter removal could be a promising practice, we carried out an experiment to assess the interest of leaf removal versus leaf shredding on disease development and fruit damages. For one of the two cultivars studied, we showed that leaf litter removal can significantly decrease scab damages on fruit and leaf in comparison to leaf shredding

Potential of hybrid 18F-fluorocholine PET/MRI for prostate cancer imaging

Purpose: To report the first results of hybrid 18F-fluorocholine PET/MRI imaging for the detection of prostate cancer. Methods: This analysis included 26 consecutive patients scheduled for prostate PET/MRI before radical prostatectomy. The examinations were performed on a hybrid whole-body PET/MRI scanner. The MR acquisitions which included T2-weighted, diffusion-weighted and dynamic contrast-enhanced sequences were followed during the same session by whole-body PET scans. Parametric maps were constructed to measure normalized T2-weighted intensity (nT2), apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), volume transfer constant (K trans), extravascular extracellular volume fraction (v e) and standardized uptake values (SUV). With pathology as the gold standard, ROC curves were calculated using logistic regression for each parameter and for the best combination with and without PET to obtain a MR model versus a PETMR model. Results: Of the 26 patients initially selected, 3 were excluded due to absence of an endorectal coil (2 patients) or prosthesis artefacts (1 patient). In the whole prostate, the area under the curve (AUC) for SUVmax, ADC, nT2, K trans and v e were 0.762, 0.756, 0.685, 0.611 and 0.529 with a best threshold at 3.044 for SUVmax and 1.075×10−3mm2/s for ADC. The anatomical distinction between the transition zone and the peripheral zone showed the potential of the adjunctive use of PET. In the peripheral zone, the AUC of 0.893 for the PETMR model was significantly greater (p = 0.0402) than the AUC of 0.84 for the MR model only. In the whole prostate, no relevant correlation was observed between ADC and SUVmax. The SUVmax was not affected by the Gleason score. Conclusion: The performance of a hybrid whole-body 18F-fluorocholine PET/MRI scan in the same session combined with a prostatic MR examination did not interfere with the diagnostic accuracy of the MR sequences. The registration of the PET data and the T2 anatomical MR sequence data allowed precise localization of hypermetabolic foci in the prostate. While in the transition zone the adenomatous hyperplasia interfered with cancer detection by PET, the quantitative analysis tool performed well for cancer detection in the peripheral zone

Flooding of industrial facilities. Vulnerability reduction in practice

International audienceInternational databases such as OFDA and CRED show that floods accounted for more than half of disasters registered for the 1990-2001 period Worldwide. With conséquences of climate change largely unpredictable at local level, future statistics are not likely to show any improvement. As human activities historically developed in river areas and floodplains, industrial facilities are structurally exposed to flooding. ARIA is a database maintained by BARPI, a service of the French Ministry of Ecology, reporting most of major industrial accidents occurring in the country - as well as a sélection of accidents occurring abroad. In January 2008, the French Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks (INERIS) performed an analysis of ARIA data. Results show that less than 3 % of accidents (133 events out of 5050) were caused by one or more natural hazards (e.g. flooding, storm, earthquake...). At first glance the susceptibility of countries to expérience natural-technological hazards (NaTech) appears, in average, rather low