Save the CSB

A small federal agency has protected countless lives at petrochemical plants.

All most of us saw of the burning Arkema plant in Crosby during Hurricane Harvey were pictures of fire and smoke billowing into the air.

Only later did we learn the details of what happened: how trailers full of volatile organic peroxides decomposed and started catching fire, how forklifts used to move containers of those chemicals became useless in the rising water, how workers riding out the hurricane tried to forestall a catastrophe by hand-carrying canisters of peroxides through floodwaters on a stormy night.

The inside story of what happened during those disastrous days at the Arkema plant was sorted out by investigators with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the federal agency that produced a detailed report released last month. The CSB also issued a series of recommendations that executives and workers at other petrochemical plants can use to learn the lessons their colleagues at Arkema learned the hard way during Hurricane Harvey.

That’s just the latest example of the good work the CSB has done for two decades: Studying accidents in the chemical industry so that similar mishaps can be avoided in the future. It’s not a regulatory body. It does for petrochemical plant disasters what the National Transportation Safety Board does for airline crashes. The CSB is a no-nonsense, fact-finding agency whose reports and recommendations are widely respected within the petrochemical industry. And there’s no telling how many lives it has saved.

But now, for reasons that are baffling to industry experts, the CSB’s future is in doubt because the Trump administration has recommended eliminating it. Our congressional representatives need to send the White House the message that this agency, which looks out for the safety of average people who work and live around petrochemical plants, needs to be saved.

We’re not talking about a bloated bureaucracy gone amok. The CSB is one of the smallest agencies in the federal government, with a budget of just $12 million. If this safety board has prevented just one petrochemical plant disaster — and industry experts have no doubt it has — that’s a bargain.

But as the Chronicle’s Matt Dempsey recently reported, its staff of 20 investigators has shrunk to 12; it’s hard to keep employees in a workplace that’s threatened with elimination. Meanwhile, the chairwoman of its five-member board has resigned, and there’s no indication she’s going to be replaced.

As a result of these staffing shortages, the CSB has been unable to investigate accidents happening in the Houston area. For example, a Valero refinery explosion in April injured 28 workers, but the shorthanded CSB didn’t deploy any investigators. And when it does study accidents, people still working for the agency worry that it’s not doing its job as thoroughly as before. A memo from a half-dozen of the CSB’s investigators that was obtained by the Chronicle says the agency is advocating shorter investigations that avoid analyzing companies’ safety culture.

That’s an important point to experts who’ve followed the CSB’s history. After the 2005 explosion at the BP plant in Texas City, the board investigated not only the physical cause of the disaster, but also the corporate decisions leading up to the accident. BP executives took the report to heart, adding a board member focused on safety, instituting a new incident reporting system and appointing an independent panel examining safety issues within the company.

Now there’s serious question whether the CSB could handle another huge accident like the BP explosion. U.S. Rep. Gene Green, the retiring congressman whose district includes the Houston Ship Channel, bluntly predicts the agency won’t have the staffing capacity for another BP-scale disaster.

Green shouldn’t be the only voice expressing concern. Our congressional delegation, particularly Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Ted Cruz, know the importance of the petrochemical industry along the Texas Gulf Coast. Saving the modestly funded Chemical Safety Board should be one of their top priorities.