Arpa Piemonte — Mapping of cement-asbestos roofing

The survey of buildings containing concrete-asbestos is part of the “Regional Project for Protection, Decontamination, Disposal and Remediation of the Environment for the Protection of Asbestos Dangers” 2010-2014.The project for mapping covers with asbestos presence was initiated experimentally by Arpa Piemonte in 2012 and entered into the operational phase at the beginning of 2013 through the collaboration between the Environmental Geographic Information System structure that has been responsible for several years the development of methodologies and models of remote sensing and classification of aerophotographic and satellite images, the Regional Asbestos Hub and the Provincial Departments of the Agency. All data resulting from the remote sensing phase shall be made available to the department’s technicians for subsequent field verification phases. This allows the constant updating of the data and consultation both through computers and with mobile devices (tablets, smartphones)The dataset is composed of the representative points of the covers (or portions of covers) identified by remote sensing and subsequently verified in the field, for which the presence of MCAs or remediations (performed or ongoing).The mapping was carried out using a series of criteria, which allowed to select the priority and most significant areas of the territory: in particular, the most densely inhabited and relevant industrial and territorial districts have been taken into account; on the other hand, areas at altitudes above 1 000 m have been excluded as they are poorly man-made and in any case poor in major industrial settlements.For this purpose, the Piedmontese municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants have been taken into account, according to the ISTAT 2011 census data. Since the remote sensing methodology is based on the elaboration of individual aerial orthoimages (cutting sections CTR 1:10.000), it was necessary to include in the study process all the sections necessary to cover spatially the municipal territories with more than 10,000 inhabitants. The overall area of investigation therefore appears to be much wider, including in whole or in part also many other smaller municipalities close to the main ones. Overall, 9,200 square kilometers per 3,200,000 inhabitants were investigated, or 75 % of the regional population.The methodology focused on the use of automatic “object oriented” analysis and classification techniques to extract from orthophotos a level of ‘possible presence of asbestos cement’ according to the spectral response of territorial objects and in a subsequent elaboration in the GIS environment for the precise definition of the buildings involved. An important final phase of verification and integration of the results through traditional photointerpretation and, where possible, surveys in the field, with the collaboration of the Provincial Departments and the Arpa Asbestos Pole, allowed to define a final Geodatabase sufficiently tested.In February 2018, the table data were integrated with information on the type of the building and the estimated amount of asbestos.The geoservices are updated with real-time frequency, while the download dataset is updated periodically (frequency about monthly).