This paper describes the background, functioning and status of the new version of the Major Accident Reporting System, MARS 3.0, dedicated to collect data on major accidents involving dangerous substances from the Member States of the European Union, to analyse and statistically process them, and to create subsets of all non-confidential data and analysis results for export to all participating Member States. This information exchange and analysis tool is made up of two connected parts: one for each local unit (i.e., for the Component Authority of each participating Member State), and one central part for the European Commission. The local as well as the central parts of this information network can serve both as data logging systems and, on different levels of complexity, as data analysis tools. The analysis of events notified to MARS 3.0 is based on two alternative types of approaches: Boolean searches of coded categories of event characteristics (for the local and central units) and hypertext-search based pattern analysis of free text descriptions of event characteristics (for the central unit only). This second option allows the accident causes to be identified and consistently analysed in a much efficient and objective way, and the succession of the disruptive factors leading to the accident to be identified. (A)
Abstract