Chemical exposure

Crosby explosions prove we should know about hazardous materials in our midst.

Crosby is a community where people are accustomed to living around industrial plants, but now even these usually tolerant Texans are downright mad about the catastrophe caused by a chemical plant explosion that happened in the middle of the biggest natural disaster in their town’s history.

Amid last week’s flooding, everybody living within a 1.5 mile radius of Crosby’s Arkema chemical plant was forced to evacuate just before at least two tons of volatile organic peroxides exploded and caught fire. The whole world watched on television as flames shot up from the floodwaters that inundated Crosby. That calamity was bad enough, but company officials ignited their own firestorm by cloaking their plant’s inventory in secrecy. And the blame for keeping the public in the dark is shared by our state’s top elected leader.

Arkema — whose poor public relations last week became a case study in botched media crisis management — initially refused to tell the people of Crosby what chemicals were stored in their community. Days after the first explosions, Arkema finally released a list of its inventory, but it still wouldn’t reveal important details such as how much was stored on its site or where the chemicals were located. Then officials deliberately set fire to some containers of chemicals without any advance notice, detonating more explosions that frightened anxious neighbors living outside the evacuation zone.

“You don’t know what’s in there,” Crosby resident John Rull told a Chronicle reporter. “You don’t know what’s in the air. Their time for keeping secrets is up.” We agree. Let those words be a lesson for Gov. Greg Abbott. He’s explicitly authorized the secrecy that prevents Texans from finding out about the hazardous chemicals stored not only at the Arkema plant in Crosby, but at plants and warehouses located in neighborhoods throughout the state.

Abbott was attorney general when a deadly explosion rocked the north Texas town of West in 2013. In the wake of that disaster, Abbott decided the state government should begin withholding reports about chemical inventories stored in warehouses and manufacturing plants, arguing the information could be useful to terrorists. Paxton, the current attorney general, has maintained the same position. When reporters asked then attorney general Abbott how Texans were supposed to find out what hazardous materials imperil their communities, he blithely suggested homeowners “simply ask the companies what substances are kept on site.”

Nonsense. We tried that, and it didn’t work. When the Chronicle asked 20 companies and local emergency response agencies for that information in 2014, half of them released either limited data or no inventories at all. Now people in Crosby are getting the same brush off. An Arkema spokesperson said a detailed breakdown of its inventory would have to come from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, but TCEQ said the company is free to release that information “if they so choose.”

Businesses storing hazardous materials in Texas communities shouldn’t have that choice. This basic level of disclosure should be required by law, and the state should release that information to anybody who wants it. If our attorney general’s office insists upon using anti-terrorism legislation as a pretext for keeping endangered communities in the dark, the Legislature needs to change the law.

Something’s wrong when a McDonald’s restaurant in Crosby has to reveal how many calories kids are eating in its Happy Meals, but an industrial plant can keep its inventory of explosive chemicals a secret.

We’ve never heard of a terrorist attack on a chemical plant in the United States, but we’ve seen plenty of explosions and evacuations caused by accidents at facilities storing volatile materials. Our state government should stop using the hypothetical threat of terrorism as an excuse for withholding crucial information about hazardous materials, like the volatile chemicals that exploded in the midst of last week’s disaster in southeast Texas.

Our state government should stop using the hypothetical threat of terrorism as an excuse for withholding crucial information about hazardous materials, like the volatile chemicals that exploded in the midst of last week’s disaster in southeast Texas.