Seven different agencies regulate fertilizer plants
in Texas, but none has authority over how close they are to homes and
schools
PREVENTABLE?: A member of the Valley
Mills Fire Department walks among the remains of an apartment complex
next to the fertilizer plant that exploded on April 17, 2013 in West,
Texas. Seven different agencies regulate fertilizer plants in Texas, but
none of them have authority over how close they are to homes and
schools.
Image: Erich Schlegel/Getty Images
A week after a blast at a Texas fertilizer plant
killed at least 15 people and hurt more than 200, authorities still don't know exactly why the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company plant exploded.
Here's what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn't been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
since 1985. Its owners
do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland
Security
that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive
fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial
safety inspection of the facility in 2011
led to $5,250 in fines.
We've laid out which agencies were in charge of regulating the plant and who's investigating the explosion now.
What happened, exactly?
Around 7:30 p.m. on April 17, a fire broke out at the West Chemical and
Fertilizer Company plant in West, Texas, a small town of about 2,800
people 75 miles south of Dallas. Twenty minutes later, it blew up. The
explosion
shook houses
50 miles away and was so powerful that the United States Geological
Survey registered it as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake. It flattened homes
within a
five-block radius and destroyed a nursing home, an apartment complex, and a nearby middle school. According to the New York Times, the blast
left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and the fire "burned with such intensity that
railroad tracks were fused."
The blast killed at least 15 people,
most of them firefighters and other first responders.
Have fertilizer plants ever exploded before?
Yes. A plant in Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, that manufactured ammonium nitrate
fertilizer 2014 the same explosive chemical stored in West 2014
exploded on Dec. 13, 1994, killing four people and injuring 18.
But fertilizer plants are safer now, said Stephen Slater, the Iowa
administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "All
kinds of technologies have had huge improvements," he
told the Des Moines Register.
"And we haven't had any bad experiences at the plants in the 20 years
since [the accident]. I'm knocking on wood." (Slater didn't respond to
our requests for comment.)
Who regulates these fertilizer plants?
At least seven different state and federal agencies can regulate Texas
fertilizer plants like the one in West: OSHA, the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S.
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Texas
Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality and the Texas Feed and Fertilizer Control Service.
Some of the agencies don't appear to have shared information before the blast.
Fertilizer
plants that hold more than 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, for instance, are required to notify the Department of Homeland
Security.
(Ammonium nitrate can be used to make bombs. It's what Timothy McVeigh
used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
in 1995.) The West plant held 270 tons 2014 yes, tons 2014 of the
chemical last year, according to a report it filed with the Texas
Department of State Health Services, but the plant
didn't tell Homeland Security.
Carrie Williams, a Department of State Health Services spokeswoman, told
ProPublica that the agency isn't required to pass that information 2014
which is also sent to local authorities 2014 on to Homeland Security.
While the exact cause of the explosion is unknown, a federal official
told the New York Times
that investigators believed it was caused by the ammonium nitrate. The
blast crater is in the area of the plant where the chemical was stored.
The plant
also filed a "worst-case release scenario"
report with
the EPA and local officials stating there was no risk of a fire or an
explosion. The scenario described an anhydrous ammonia leak that
wouldn't hurt anyone.
Did any of these agencies fail to inspect the plant when they should have?
It's unclear. OSHA
conducted the last full safety inspection of the plant in 1985. "Since then," the Huffington Post
reported,
"regulators from other agencies have been inside the plant, but they
looked only at certain aspects of plant operations, such as whether the
facility was abiding by labeling rules when packaging its fertilizer for
sale."
You can view the full OSHA report
here.
Since 2011, OSHA has carried out inspections based in part on the level
of risk that plants like the one in West reported to the EPA. Since the
West plant had told the EPA there was no risk of a fire or an
explosion, it wasn't a priority. The plant also may have been
exempt from some inspections as
a small employer. An OSHA spokesman told ProPublica that the agency
would be investigating whether the plant had such an exemption.
As the Huffington Post also noted, the most recent federal safety
inspection of the plant, in 2011, resulted in a $5,250 fine for failing
to draft a safety plan for pressured canisters of anhydrous ammonia,
among other infractions. (There's no evidence that anhydrous ammonia
played any role in the explosion.)
Why was a plant that stored explosive chemicals allowed to be located so close to a school?
The EPA and other federal agencies actually don't regulate how close
such plants can be to schools, nursing homes and population centers. In
Texas, the decision is
left up to the local zoning authorities.
A Dallas Morning News
investigation in
2008 found that Dallas County residents were "at risk of a toxic
disaster because outdated and haphazard zoning has allowed homes,
apartments and schools to be built within blocks 2014 in some cases even
across the street 2014 from sites that use dangerous chemicals."
Ed Sykora, who owns a Ford dealership in West and spent a dozen years on the school board and the city council,
told the Huffington Post
he couldn't recall the town discussing whether it was a good idea to
build houses and the school so close to the plant, which has been there
since 1962. "The land was available out there that way; they could get
sewer and other stuff that way without building a bunch of new lines,"
Sykora said. "There never was any thought about it. Maybe that was
wrong."
Who's investigating what happened?
OSHA, the EPA and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board
are all investigating. But don't hold your breath waiting for the Chemical Safety Board's conclusions. The agency
is still investigating a
blast that killed seven workers at an oil refinery in Washington State
three years ago, as well as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that
killed 11 workers in 2010 and sent oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico
for months.
A Center for Public Integrity investigation found that the number of
accident reports completed by the Chemical Safety Board had declined
dramatically since 2006. Daniel Horowitz, the agency's managing
director, said that the agency was stretched thin and had been asking
for more investigators for years.
"Going forward, the owners and employees of Adair Grain and West
Fertilizer Co. are working closely with investigating agencies,"Donald
Adair, the plant's owner and a West resident,said in a
statement last Friday. "We are presenting all employees for interviews and will assist in the fact finding to whatever degree possible."
Has Congress introduced any new regulation legislation?
Yes, but it would roll back regulations rather than strengthen them.
Eleven representatives 2014 one Democrat and 10 Republicans 2014
sponsored a bill in February that would limit the EPA's regulatory authority over fertilizer
plants.
It has been endorsed by industry groups such as the Fertilizer
Institute. Kathy Mathers, a spokeswoman for the Fertilizer Institute,
told ProPublica that the group supports the bill because it would more
clearly spell out how the EPA can regulate the industry.
From ProPublica.org (find the original story here); reprinted with permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment