flooded Arkema chemical plant in the town of Crosby, northeast of Houston, Texas, that saw a pair of explosions early Thursday, sending thick black smoke into the air. Officials evacuated residents within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the facility, which produces highly volatile chemicals known as organic peroxides.
a new investigation reveals the explosions come after Arkema successfully pressured federal regulators to delay new regulations aimed at improving safety procedures at chemical plants. It also found that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton aggressively attacked a proposed chemical plant safety rule, after his election campaign garnered over $100,000 from chemical industry donors.
David Sirota talking:
the rule that is at issue in our story is a rule that was proposed during the Obama era after the explosion, an earlier chemical plant explosion, in West Texas. The rule would have required third-party audits of safety procedures at chemical plants. It would have required more disclosure to the community about what is in chemical plants, what specific chemicals are being housed in chemical plants. And it would have mandated a better coordination and a closer relationship between chemical companies and first responders and emergency services in those communities.
And what ended up happening was, when that rule was proposed, Republicans in Congress, top Republicans, pushed forward a bill, a set of bills, both in the House and Senate, to basically delay and effectively kill that rule. And that was a way for them to signal that they wanted the Trump administration to kill that rule. As you mentioned and in our story, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also was one of the—one of a number of Republican officials who sent a letter to the EPA demanding that the rule basically be withdrawn. It was highly critical of the rule, saying it was overly burdensome to the chemical industry. You had Arkema, in a letter to the EPA, basically making the same argument. And you had the American Chemistry Council, which Arkema is a member of, which is a big lobbying group in Washington, also making similar arguments.
And then, what ended up happening was that the Texas—many Texas Republicans ended up supporting the legislation in the Congress, as they have been getting large campaign contributions from the chemical industry, legislation that would effectively kill those rules. And the Trump administration obliged. The Trump administration delayed those rules until at least 2019, Scott Pruitt issuing that order. Scott Pruitt himself, as attorney general of Oklahoma, he had supported—he had demanded that the EPA withdraw those rules, while he was running a group that had received $50,000 from the American Chemistry Council. So, effectively, what happened, you had chemical industry-funded politicians who made sure, and were successful, in helping the chemical industry, including Arkema, lobby to delay and, effectively, at least for now, kill those safety rules.
many chemical companies, including Arkema, were lobbying against these rules, by the way, during the Obama administration and then into the Trump administration era, through, again, lobbying groups like the American Chemistry Council. Arkema also lobbied on the rules. Other companies lobbied on the rules. I mean, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, SABIC, the Saudi Arabian part-government-owned chemical conglomerate, lobbied against these rules. And they were successful, and, again, as campaign cash had flowed into the coffers of many Republicans, many Republicans from Texas, who ended up supporting the legislative effort to get rid of the rules, and ultimately the Trump administration acted.
Matt Dempsey talking:
the only thing I can think of that changed is there was a lot of attention to the presser that—where they said they wouldn’t provide it. And then, I believe—so, the other thing about the info dump that I got, that just list of chemical names, like 29 chemical names, and that’s all it is, right? That was—I sent a very angry email asking where—why did I not get the Tier II? And their response was that the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality has informed them that all requests for the Tier II should go through them. The interesting thing about that is that means we probably won’t get access to that Tier II ever, because when Greg Abbott—now-Governor Greg Abbott—was then attorney general, his office issued a ruling that said that people don’t have the right to access Tier IIs from the state. So, now, the state is telling a private company, Arkema, to ask the state for information that they know they are not going to provide. It’s really incredibly frustrating.
I do want to point something out. I don’t think it’s a hard push to convince politicians in the state of Texas to do what the chemical industry wants them to do. Like, for example, there was a lot of focus on the Republican delegation from Texas. Democrats haven’t done very much, either. Like, there’s been very few bills proposed by Democrats in Texas or in the Ship Channel or in the Houston metro area or along this petrochemical capital of the country, from either party, on increasing or strengthening right-to-know laws. The stuff that—the information—the rules that David was bringing up, that was done by President Obama as an executive order after the West incident. And the American Chemistry Council is extremely powerful. They basically call the shots when it comes to what people get to know and how the chemical industry is regulated. Like, a really good example is it took decades for the Toxic Substance Control Act to finally get passed. And in a lot of ways, it only passed because Frank Lautenberg died, and they met—his colleagues in Congress felt bad that they hadn’t passed it up to that point.
The New Jersey senator. So, even then, thought, the only version of the Toxic Substance Control Act, which is more about consumer substance—effects by those substances—the only version of it that passed through Congress and got signed into law is the one that the American Chemistry Council essentially approved of.
David Sirota talking:
Scott Pruitt, when he weighed in on the proposed safety rules that we’re discussing, as attorney general of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt made an argument that many attorney generals who were opposed to these rules in the states, that they were arguing, as well. And that argument was, essentially, that the expanded mandates for the public’s right to know, the expanded mandates for those, would threaten national security by allowing the bad guys—basically, terrorists—to know where dangerous chemicals are. So they were basically arguing, by allowing the community to know where potentially hazardous, poisonous material is, both in normal practice and even during and after a catastrophe or a crisis, that even allowing the public to know would potentially empower terrorists to know that information and organize attacks, potentially, on those chemical plants, and that—so, thereby, their argument was, Scott Pruitt’s argument was, that allowing the public to know would be an undue risk for national security. And he said that the rules should be withdrawn.
Now, the other side of the argument was, of course, that the public should have a right to know about the chemical compounds in its communities, especially when it comes to emergency situations. But, ultimately, the Scott Pruitt side won out, because he went on from Oklahoma attorney general to become the EPA administrator who eventually and ultimately delayed and, effectively, at least for now, killed those rules.
Matt Dempsey talking:
the Arkema facility, in 2011 and, I believe it was, 2015, was cited by TCEQ for—essentially, for a fire that started with organic peroxides in 2011 and, I believe, in 2016 for not being able to control the temperature in a reactor very well. And then, last August, the—OSHA has fined them tens of thousands of dollars for mishandling—having, essentially, process safety violations for hazardous materials. They were mishandling hazardous materials.
So, the analysis we did for “Chemical Breakdown” showed that there’s a number of facilities—we essentially made an index that ranked facilities on their potential for harm. And we had like 55 facilities that were like the highest potential for harm. I’m doing a really shortcut version of this, but my really, really quick and dirty analysis, that I need to go into more detail on, that I did yesterday, showed that there’s 13 of those 55 are in the 100-year floodplain. We’re way past the 100-year floodplain with this flood. In fact, Arkema was in the 500-year floodplain.
So, one of the things that I want to do as a reporter, going forward, is find out just how many of these facilities that have highly potentially dangerous chemicals got impacted by this flood, and we just haven’t heard about it. There’s a lot—there’s more than 2,500 chemical facilities in Houston. They’re all shut down due to the flooding, and they’re all going to start up soon. The Chemical Safety Board sent out a safety alert yesterday warning companies to be extra careful and make sure they’re doing their due diligence on doing startups, because startup and shutdowns is when most incidents occur. And so, I am genuinely worried, both from an environmental perspective and from a public safety, like, and a hazard perspective, like Arkema, you know, what’s going to happen when all of these facilities all spin up all at the same time, after encountering, essentially, like biblical-proportion flood.
– Arkema President Richard Rennard, the president of the Arkema division, said The toxicity is a “relative thing.”
in some way, in a weird like pedantic kind of way, he’s right. Toxicity is relative. So, the government does—measures like exposure rates for certain chemicals. And the way they measure it is like how much of a chemical will kill you, how much of a chemical will disable you so you cannot get away to help yourself, and then how much of a—how much of a material will be very uncomfortable—you won’t like it, but you won’t—you’ll be able to get away, you’ll be able to remove yourself from the situation. So toxicity is relative. But it’s kind of nonsense to say toxicity is relative, and not explain how toxic then. It’s almost like a joke. So, it’s toxic. Well, how toxic? Even though he won’t say that it’s toxic.
So, my thought, honestly, from what I know of the stuff that’s burning, the organic peroxides, is that it’s more likely that we’re experiencing exposure levels on that last part, that it’s irritating, it’s uncomfortable, it will affect people with cardiovascular disease or asthma, but it’s something you could probably escape from. You can get to your home. You can shelter in place, if you needed to.
The company has said they expect all eight of those freezer trailers, that each have 32,000 pounds of organic peroxides, to explode in the coming days.
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David Sirota
senior editor for investigations at the International Business Times.
Matt Dempsey
data reporter with the Houston Chronicle.
— source democracynow.org