Budget guts nearly all but defense

CHEMICAL SAFETY: Experts say disbanding board ‘standing up for death and destruction’

A White House proposal to eliminate funding for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board signals a full retreat from two decades of progress against chemical disasters and would, if enacted, put American lives in jeopardy, health and safety experts said.

While little known to the masses, the CSB is to chemical disasters what the much betterfunded National Transportation Safety Board is to airline crashes, train derailments and bridge collapses. Without the recommendations that come from these boards, preventable accidents repeat themselves.

Gutting the CSB is “standing up for death and destruction,”

said chemical safety consultant Paul Orum. “It’s disrespectful to those killed in such incidents.”

A Houston Chronicle investigation last year found that federal agencies, including the CSB, don’t have enough resources to provide adequate oversight to facilities that handle dangerous chemicals.

Three of the most farreaching investigations in the history of chemical safety resulted from the CSB.

Enhancing safety

In 2005, a unit at BP’s Texas City refinery overfilled with hydrocarbons, releasing a massive cloud of liquid and gas that exploded, killing 15 and injuring more than 180.

Just as important as the agency’s causal findings

was its recommendation that BP launch an independent examination of its corporate safety culture. Together, these two reports rippled through an industry that had long harped on worker safety, like preventing falls and wearing the right equipment, to the detriment of process safety — designing and monitoring chemical and refining units to prevent releases and explosions.

“It’s a seminal investigation,” said CSB Chairwoman Vanessa Allen Sutherland. “The lessons ... are frequently cited and discussed, and it was 10 years ago.”

They’ve been incorporated into academic curriculums, industry technical standards and corporate behavior, and triggered a massive emphasis on refinery safety by the Labor Department.

No specifics given

Then in 2010, BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, leading to an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 people, injured 17 and caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history. CSB findings in 2016 showed gaping holes in offshore safety and regulatory oversight that hadn’t been addressed despite numerous earlier investigations and lawsuits.

The disaster cost BP more than $60 billion — some of which could be subsidized by taxpayers. By contrast, the CSB budget is about $12 million annually, or one thousandth of 1 percent of the $1.1 trillion that President Trump proposes spending.

So while it’s difficult to prove any one disaster

has been prevented by the agency, stopping just one could justify the cost of the CSB since its inception in 1998, said Mike Wright, director of safety for the United Steelworkers union.

“We think it’s a remarkably stupid move” to kill the agency, Wright said. “The CSB is probably one of the best deals in Washington in terms of spending the taxpayer’s money.”

It’s also the only agency that investigates chemical accidents without companies having to worry about fines or indictments. That’s because its focus is finding root causes and lessons that can be shared across industries. And it examines the failings of regulators.

The CSB was given no specific indication why it was targeted, Sutherland said, though it falls in line with the president’s pledge to cut broadly to pay for a beefed-up military and border protection.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was unclear where industry stands. The two major trade associations, the American Chemistry Council and the American Petroleum Institute, offered statements that didn’t directly address the merits of eliminating the CSB.

Shakeel Kadri, president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, said his group supports the CSB and says the agency’s independent investigations are critical.

“We can’t do that. I don’t see anyone else being able to do that, either,” he said.

It’s widely believed the overall budget proposal

was dead on arrival at the Capitol, as even Republicans blanched at what was and wasn’t being cut.

“I think the Trump budget is a fantasy,” said Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat whose district includes much of Houston’s heavy industry. “I don’t think so much of it will ever be considered.”

That doesn’t mean the CSB will survive unscathed. Among its 40 employees, some were already privately assuming that Congress would significantly scale back the agency this year. And, as a measure of the administration’s priorities, Thursday’s proposal was an exclamation point on a flurry of activity aimed at rolling back worker and chemical safety regulations.

A ‘really sad matter’

On Monday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt acceded to industry demands by agreeing to delay and reconsider implementation of Obama-era rules that came as a direct result of the 2013 West Fertilizer disaster. It killed 15 people, including 12 firstresponders who rushed to a fire at the plant before it exploded.

Sutherland said the resulting CSB investigation was another of the agency’s most important, exposing major gaps in emergency planning and response across the nation.

In agreeing to delay the rules, and perhaps scrap them altogether, Pruitt accepted the industry’s argument that, because investigators last year ruled the West fire an arson, it renders them moot.

But the arson ruling has no bearing on other factors

in the explosion, Sutherland said. Had the fertilizer been stored differently, had first-responders received training on the wellknown explosion hazards of ammonium nitrate, had the town not grown perilously close to the plant over the years, much of the death and destruction would have been averted.

Republican lawmakers already have introduced a bill that could roll back the Obama regulations, should the EPA not take up the task.

At least 46 people have died in U.S. chemical plants since West.

Sam Mannan, director of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University, called elimination of the CSB a “really sad matter.”

“Everyone uses the CSB’s videos and reports,” he said.

Orum, the consultant, noted the gap between congressional authorization of the CSB in 1990, and its actual funding in 1998. The budget argument was that OSHA and EPA could handle chemical accident investigations. But they weren’t as thorough, and industry preferred the CSB, because it didn’t come in looking for violations, Orum said.

He expects “cooler heads” in Congress.

“Chemical incidents are highly visible when they happen,” he said. “There’s smoke, flames and news cameras. If it looks like they’ve undermined safety, it could come back to bite them.”