Linking Chemistry To Plant Accidents

Daniel Horowitz, the recently appointed managing director of the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), began his first speech in his new role as top staff member with a grim litany of deadly chemical accidents.

Speaking to the CSB staff in September, Horowitz, an organic chemist with a decade of experience on the accident board, laid out a list of tragedies that occurred in the past century—a high school in New London, Texas, where unodorized natural gas exploded in 1937 killing 269 students and 24 teachers; a Los Angeles electroplating plant in which mishandled perchloric acid exploded in 1947 ending the lives of 17 people including a 12-year-old boy riding by on his bike; an Indiana refinery and tower that blew up in 1955, blasting tons of debris and killing a three-year-old boy sleeping in his home; a refinery in Sunray, Texas, where a pentane/hexane tank caught fire in 1956 killing 19 firefighters.

Horowitz then asked CSB’s accident investigators and safety experts to provide details of what went wrong.

“Even among our audience of chemical safety professionals,” he tells C&EN, “no one could provide details of exactly what happened. My point is that one day all accidents are doomed to be forgotten.

“The board’s challenge is to make sure that some permanent change occurs to a code, an industrial practice, or a regulation so that after the accidents, the victims, and the investigations have been swept away by time, something valuable still endures.”

Each older accident in some way, Horowitz says, mirrors one of the 60-plus accidents the board has investigated in the past 13 years. “We see emergency responders tragically killed trying to save property; we see siting issues with homes located too close to factories and refineries; we see unregulated reactive hazards at plants.”

For chemists, Horowitz’s professional path—from an organic chemistry major in graduate school to bench researcher to American Chemical Society congressional policy fellow to CSB managing director—shows the broad range of opportunities available for scientists who want to be public servants and apply their knowledge and experience to policy and government.

The small board on which Horowitz serves merges chemical science, industrial safety, and national policy through its charge to investigate and determine the root cause of significant chemical accidents. Although only in action since the late 1990s and with no regulatory power, CSB reports and recommendations have changed state and federal regulations, industry practices, and the codes of professional safety associations. With a five-member board, a staff of 46, including board members, and an annual budget of $10.6 million, CSB is a federal gnat.

In September, CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso appointed Horowitz to the newly created position of managing director, which reports directly to him and is responsible for all aspects of CSB operations—from accident investigations to public affairs to human resources and administration.

Horowitz started at CSB in 2000 and for the past half-dozen years directed the agency’s public outreach. He joined the board at a difficult time. Only three years old, CSB was understaffed and embroiled in disputes among board members and staff. With much fanfare, it had begun dozens of investigations but had completed only three reports. The internal clashes and meager output disappointed the board’s stakeholders, a disparate group that includes chemical and oil companies, labor unions, environmental organizations, state and federal regulators, and the public. Still, these stakeholders stuck by the agency, mostly on the basis of their hopes and vision for its future (C&EN, Aug. 14, 2000, page 27).

When Horowitz arrived, his job, he says, was primarily “to plug whatever hole was leaking that day.” An early assignment was to complete a report on an explosion at Sonat Exploration, in Louisiana, where four workers were killed in an oil and gas production facility. From there, he worked on briefings, budget preparation, congressional testimony, and investigation reports. Mostly, however, his job was to rebuild the board’s reputation. It slowly happened with time and a shuffling of board members and staff.

His greatest achievement, he says, is expanded public outreach, a key role for an agency with no regulatory authority beyond its ability to discover the cause of accidents and show the benefit of changing industrial practices. In particular, he points to his work that led to production of some 25 safety videos that have won awards and an international following. The board has taken advantage like no other federal agency of the Web’s growing worldwide social media network and the viral distribution of materials through the Web. CSB’s first foray—a video on its investigation of the BP Texas City, Texas, refinery accident in 2005—drew more than a half-million downloads shortly after it was posted.

The videos use lifelike animations to reenact the accidents with comments from board members, experts, witnesses, and victims. They allow the viewer to see an accident build and to understand the missteps and chemistry that brought it about. The videos have been translated into more than a half-dozen languages and have won several awards, including the ACS Division of Chemical Health & Safety’s Howard Fawcett Award.

With a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge, an M.S. in chemistry from Stanford University, and an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University, Horowitz brings a chemist’s eye to the job. Both his parents are Ph.D. chemists. His mother, 87, has been an ACS member for more than 60 years.

“She was a groundbreaker,” he says of his mother, who received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1944.

After Cambridge, Horowitz moved to Washington, D.C., in 1994 for a one-year stint as an ACS congressional fellow. He worked for the House Science Committee, where he prepared legislation; wrote speeches, briefings, and floor statements; and organized hearings.

It was a tumultuous time in Congress during which the Republican Party took over leadership of the House and Senate. The change led to hostile debates and a rollback of environmental and safety legislation and regulations. And it brought to an end the 23-year-old congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

“It was a time of very spirited debates over budgets, government support for industry, and how aggressive government should be in regulating environment and safety issues, ” Horowitz notes. “It had a profound effect on my career and gave me a perspective I use even today.”

Then, for three years Horowitz worked as a research chemist at Metabolix, a small biochemical company in Cambridge, Mass., where he created and managed a research program on renewable, biodegradable polymers derived from fermentation of recombinant microbes. He received 10 patents and authored several journal articles. He also was involved in several scale-up efforts and designed and oversaw construction of a biotechnology pilot plant.

In 2000, Horowitz joined the chemical safety board.

“I can’t say I apply chemistry every day,” he says, “but on occasions when CSB has to solve difficult problems, chemistry experience helps. When I first came to the board, there was an explosion at a BP facility that involved polymer decomposition, and it was very difficult to decipher what happened. We turned to laboratory tests and read the literature of nylons, and I was heavily involved in a technical capacity.

“I use chemistry knowledge periodically, but in my current role, chemistry brings a way of thinking that I try to apply to policy.”

CSB’s reports reach an audience of opposites who are often in conflict—from unions and corporations to communities and environmental groups. “We use evidence to prove our conclusions; and a graduate education in chemistry is really an ideal background,” he says, stressing the importance of developing and testing a hypothesis and the use of the scientific method.

“We have to win over skeptics with our arguments and persuasion, and that is not a way of thinking that is automatic for everyone.”

Offering advice for chemists wishing to make a shift to policy, he says they should maintain and improve their writing skills and take advantage of every opportunity to work in industrial settings and in government, as paid or volunteer interns and fellows. Horo­witz adds that CSB offers paid internships and currently its staff includes nine interns and nine former interns who are now permanent employees. Employee hours can be long, he adds, but the small size has advantages. “We can make a decision in a day that might take a month at a large institution.”

“When I came to the board, I believed that to effect positive change, the board had to grow to become much larger, but I found we can have a pretty strong impact with the resources we have.

“What I learned is by using the media and especially the digital media, CSB can leverage its impact despite small resources,” he says.

However, the board’s chairman and members are angling for a 25% increase in funding and have plans to significantly increase the number of CSB investigations.

Unions, members of Congress, and the Government Accountability Office have criticized the board for investigating too few of the more than 200 chemical accidents that occur annually that meet the board’s definition of a significant accident, worthy of investigation. Currently, it examines about a dozen accidents each year.

“I doubt we can ever get to 200,” Horowitz continues, “but we can do better than we are doing now. It will take more resources, more investigators, and a faster process. I am excited about the prospects of getting our reports out quicker.”

He notes that for CSB’s reports to drive public opinion they should be completed while the accident remains in the public’s eye, and he holds up the example of the Kleen Energy power plant accident in Middletown, Conn. Last February, six workers died and the plant was destroyed, the result of a natural gas explosion during construction. CSB’s report was released four months after the accident.

The biggest investigation on the board’s docket is this year’s BP/Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico.

The board has said it will limit its investigation to the accident’s cause, not the environmental impact or the use of chemical dispersants. About 12 CSB investigators are working on the investigation, split between its Washington, D.C., and Denver offices. More than a half dozen other investigations of the oil rig disaster are under way. Horowitz believes that CSB’s examination may be one of the smallest in terms of personnel, but he says it will not be one of the smallest in terms of impact. The investigation will take about two years, but CSB will issue interim reports along the way.

“It is the most important thing we are doing right now, and our hope—and my job as managing director—is to help make this the most impactful product we have ever done,” Horowitz says.

This is the fourth investigation of a BP accident for the board. Its involvement in the rig explosion investigation came at the urging of the House Energy & Commerce Committee leadership because of the board’s pivotal investigation of the BP Texas City, Texas, refinery accident that killed 15 workers in 2005.

“We bring a deep understanding of BP’s culture,” Horowitz notes. “But I think we will broaden the focus beyond BP. One of the unfortunate things about the prior BP investigations is that the problems that CSB illuminated were perceived as problems of one corporation, BP.

“There is lots of evidence that BP is not some outlier on these issues. They are susceptible to the same pressures as everybody else in the industry.

“The oil and chemical industry face an aging infrastructure, more competition, and cost pressure from overseas, a reduced workforce, and in some cases less training,” he adds. “These are major challenges, and we often find these factors lie at the root of an accident.”

These structural challenges are difficult to surmount, but are “achievable,” he says. “There are companies out there that will never be the subject of a CSB investigation because they won’t have these accidents even in difficult economic times.”