TEXAS, TRUMP GAVE COVER TO CROSBY BLASTS

The aftermath of national disasters like Hurricane Harvey affect more than just concerns about how high the price of our gasoline will go and how much more carbon we pour into our environment as debris is cleared, burned or buried.

We saw that this past week as dozens of refineries along the Gulf Coast shut down in flooding, each time releasing — with a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Texas governor — a toxic stew of chemicals into the flood waters and the air.

We saw it in Crosby, Texas, as nine trailers filled with 500,000 pounds of highly volatile organic peroxides overheated without power or refrigeration and began exploding with plumes of black smoke. Residents in a 1.5 mile radius remain evacuated.

What we usually don’t see — and should never see again — is any corporate official like that of the Crosby Arkema plant say he won’t tell the public what chemicals were spewed in that black smoke. He even declined to call it a chemical release.

Frankly, that’s criminal. And it’s criminal with the blessing of Texas state government officials and the Trump administration’s EPA.

Let’s backtrack: Arkema and the American Chemistry Council, in previous months had lobbied heavily against an Obama era rule that would have required more disclosure to a community about the chemicals housed in chemical plants near them. That rule mandated a third-party audit of substances in a plant, better coordination and a closer relationship between chemical companies and first responders and emergency services in the plant’s communities. It was prompted by a 2013 West Texas chemical plant explosion that killed 15 people.

The new rule should have become effective on March 14, but it was delayed until at least 2019 by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

The move was a big win for the chemical industry that has spent more than $100 million supporting federal lawmakers since 2008, according to the International Business Times. But Texas officials also received campaign donations and support from the chemical lobby. For example, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton aggressively attacked Obama’s proposed chemical plant safety rule, and his election campaign garnered more than $100,000 from chemical industry donors, according to Democracy Now.

Did we mention that Arkema has six production plants in Texas and has received more than $8.7 million worth of taxpayer subsidies from the state? Arkema’s Crosby plant — the flooded one with the explosions, was fined more than $90,000 by OSHA for 10 “serious” violations earlier this year, according to the International Business Times. That’s not the worst of it, however.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, in 2014 when he was state attorney general, gave chemical companies legal cover to hide the locations of their EPA-regulated chemicals.

His ruling, of course, flies in direct opposition to a 1986 federal law known as the Community Right to Know Act, which requires companies with large stores of chemicals onsite to report on the storage location, use and releases of hazardous substances to federal, state and local governments and to readily provide that information to homeowners, the media and emergency responders. The federal law was passed on the heels of a 1984 cyanide gas leak at a U.S. multinational Union Carbide Corp plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands. The federal rule orders each plant’s chemical reports be compiled in a publicly accessible database.

But Abbott has blocked public access to state records used to document the location of those chemicals. He says Texans in a chemical company’s neighborhood will have to ask the companies themselves, and the companies have 10 days to respond.

This week, that was the state government rule that Arkema hid behind as its officials dodged reporters’ questions about what was in the black plumes of smoke from the exploded trailers that heated up when floodwaters swamped the generators powering their refrigeration.

Don’t think this could only happen in Texas or that only Texas officials are more swayed by industry than citizens. And don’t think accidents require a natural disaster.

In March of 2015, chlorine began to leak from a one-ton cylinder in the chlorine building of the Moccasin Bend Wastewater Treatment Plant. Two treatment plant workers were overcome and taken to the hospital. Firefighters with the hazardous materials team put on encapsulated suits, made their way into the chlorine building and successfully stopped the leak after about an hour and half.

Chattanooga dodged an enormous bullet. In 2005, a train accident and derailment in Graniteville, S.C., led to the rupture of a chlorine gas tank car. Nine people died — all but one by inhaling chlorine fumes. Another 500 were treated for chlorine exposure and 5,400 residents within a mile of the crash were forced to evacuate their homes and businesses for nearly two weeks while hazardous materials teams decontaminated the area.

We can ill afford having government officials — state or federal — continue to undo long-held environmental rules.