Reforms urged at chemical safety agency
A federal agency in charge of investigating industrial incidents is lagging on completing its reports and failing to recruit enough investigators with varied expertise to reduce the backlog, workers unions and environmental groups wrote to the agency last week.
The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has not finished 19 site investigations — according to its website and the letter writers, who believed that figure to be the most open investigations in the agency’s history. The outstanding reports include four from the Houston area and three from other parts of Texas.
The CSB fills what advocates and others note is an important gap in monitoring industrial disasters. It’s been likened to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane, rail and other accidents. The CSB looks for an event’s cause and figures out how future problems might be prevented.
In the letter dated July 8, groups such as the United Steelworkers, Earthjustice and Air Alliance Houston called for reforms to address what they said were “growing concerns” with
the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission. Another letter signer, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, provided a copy of the document to the Houston Chronicle.
CSB said in a statement that it was “reviewing the letter and will respond to the appropriate parties.”
Investigators have addressed serious chemical issues in Texas in the past, prompting reform after disasters at the BP refinery in Texas City in 2005, at West Fertilizer in 2013 and at DuPont’s La Porte pesticide plant in 2014. Investigators recently haggled with Harris County over documents related to fires here, which the fire marshal’s office said couldn’t then be released.
Still, the CSB has faced criticism for years. A Houston Chronicle investigation in 2016 documented how the agency only responded to a small number of accidents in a given year. The CSB is also not a regulatory agency, and its recommendations to other federal agencies in many cases went ignored.
Staffing, resource cuts
By 2018, only 12 investigators worked at the CSB. President Donald Trump repeatedly proposed eliminating the agency, Bloomberg Law reported. Only one person remains on the agency’s five-member board, though President Joe Biden in April announced three new picks.
Rick Engler, who served as a CSB board member from 2015 to 2020, said the agency has become increasingly dysfunctional. A more robust staff is needed longterm to prevent future chemical disasters, he said. And in the short-term, the agency needs enough staffing to keep up with its deployments.
Cases in Houston area
“I would argue that the White House needs to pay greater attention to what’s going on at the CSB and provide assistance where necessary,” Engler said. “The CSB is a critical agency for protecting the safety of workers and communities but only if it functions effectively.”
This all matters because a significant number of oil refineries, petrochemical plants and tank farms operate in the Houston region, said Neil Carman, clean air director for the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter. A chemical incident occurs every six weeks in the Houston area, the 2016 Chronicle investigation found.
And those incidents have the potential to injure and cause fatalities. Among those that the CSB is investigating are the Watson Grinding explosion and fire in 2020 that led to two worker deaths; the KMCO explosion and fire in 2019 that caused one death; and the Kuraray America plant explosion in 2018 that injured 21 workers.
Then there were the tank fires at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. facility in 2019 that burned for days.
Responding and issuing reports quickly becomes important to prevent future disasters, Carman said. He noted that almost every accident is preventable: “There’s just a lot of industrial accidents happening,” he said, “and the timing is a big deal.”