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Safety

Closing The Gap

Chemical Safety Board aims to increase funding and conduct more accident investigations

by Jeff Johnson
February 15, 2010 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 88, Issue 7

STEEP COSTS
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Credit: CSB
Fourteen workers died from an explosion of combustible dust in 2008 at this Imperial Sugar facility in Savannah, Ga., one of several accidents CSB investigated.
Credit: CSB
Fourteen workers died from an explosion of combustible dust in 2008 at this Imperial Sugar facility in Savannah, Ga., one of several accidents CSB investigated.

The Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) is laying out a two-year strategy to increase the number of chemical accidents it investigates and close a growing gap between accidents that occur and accidents it’s able to investigate, says John S. Bresland, CSB’s chairman.

To do this, the board is seeking a 20% increase in its budget for fiscal 2011 from Congress. CSB will also begin targeted hiring for the remainder of this fiscal year in preparation for the funding increase. Its plan includes establishing a new office in Houston, the heart of the U.S. oil and chemical industry, where some 20% of the accidents CSB has investigated have occurred.

Increasingly, the board has had to limit its investigations or take longer to complete them because of budget constraints. By federal agency standards, CSB’s budget is minuscule: For 2010, it’s $10.6 million and it has been mostly flat for the past half-dozen years. The board wants to increase its funding for 2011 to $12.7 million, which would be $1.9 million more than what the Obama Administration is requesting in its proposal. As an independent federal agency, CSB can submit its budget request to Congress without regard for what the Administration recommends.

In the past, the board has sought an increase in funding from Congress without much success. This time, however, it has the backing of several congressional members, including West Virginia Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV (D) and Robert C. Byrd (D), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Unfortunately, the West Virginians’ support is driven by tragic accidents that occurred in their state near Charleston—one at a DuPont plant, where a worker died from a phosgene leak (C&EN, Feb. 1, page 8), and another at a Bayer CropScience plant that blew up, killing two workers and nearly rupturing a tank of methyl isocyanate (C&EN, May 11, 2009, page 25).

Last month, when CSB announced it was going to conduct a formal investigation of the DuPont accident, board member William E. Wright warned that the probe will likely delay efforts to complete other thorny examinations that are being done by the same CSB team. These include the Bayer CropScience investigation as well as one involving an Ohio company. Wright added that the board has a full plate and, including the DuPont accident, is examining 17 incidents, the largest number of active investigations in its 11-year history.

In a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee seeking additional CSB funding, Rockefeller said it was “intolerable” that one investigation should “hurt the ability of another equally important investigation to move forward.”

In statements, Byrd and Rockefeller applauded the board for successfully meeting its charge of investigating the root cause of chemical accidents despite its small budget. In the decade since it began operating, CSB has issued reports on some 60 accidents, which appear to be just the tip of an iceberg of chemically related incidents. Although the board doesn’t have regulatory authority, its reports, videos, and recommendations are supported by many chemical company executives, chemical engineering professionals and professors, local communities, and many in the labor movement. Many supporters, however, want a more aggressive board. CSB has also been criticized by a variety of parties for its failure to enlarge its investigation base.

For example, several unions have accused CSB of lacking the will to aggressively investigate plant accidents, and a December 2009 editorial by the Houston Chronicle slammed the board for failing to investigate two accidents at Houston-area plants in which one worker was killed and several were injured. The editorial acknowledged that Bresland had said he wants to investigate more but lacks the resources to pull it off.

In a similar vein, an August 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report identified what it called an “investigation gap” and urged the board to close it. At the time, Bresland cautioned that CSB is not required to investigate all serious accidents, but he acknowledged that more investigations would strengthen the board’s mission (C&EN, Aug. 28, 2008, page 12).

According to board documents, last year, 237 U.S. chemical accidents occurred that CSB considered of “high consequence,” meaning they resulted in deaths, hospitalization, property damage in excess of $500,000, large evacuations, or other specific harms that are spelled out in the board’s mission.

Thirty-two of these accidents resulted in one or more fatalities, but the board investigated only seven of them, along with eight other serious accidents that CSB believed merited a closer look. As a result, the board took on a total of 15 accidents in 2009. This means that 25 fatal industrial chemical accidents were not investigated. Included in this group is an incident in which a firefighter was killed, one in which four workers died, and one at a recycling plant where a hydrogen sulfide release took the lives of three workers, including a father and son.

In interviews, CSB staff stress that they want to do more and that they don’t disagree with GAO’s findings or the unions’ criticisms. They blame the lack of funding.

Going forward, Bresland sees a way to increase the investigations without busting the bank.

First, the board wants to establish a five-member investigative team in Houston. The Houston office would continue a trend CSB began when it recently created a five-person office in Denver. There are a host of advantages in regional offices, Bresland says, particularly a more rapid response when an accident occurs. As a result, investigators can quickly gather evidence, secure the site, and better understand the accident’s cause. Bresland also says it has been difficult to fill investigative positions in the Washington, D.C., area because of the high cost of living there and the reluctance of chemical engineers to move to the region. The Denver job posting resulted in two to three times the number of job applicants, he notes, compared with similar postings in Washington.

CSB also wants to create a permanent three-member team to conduct brief investigations and quickly publish the results of small but significant accidents. These investigations would be similar to a current series undertaken by the Denver office, Bresland says. These studies would look at “hot work,” he explains, such as welding or torch cutting near flammable storage tanks and would result in a safety bulletin, rather than a lengthy CSB report.

He predicts that with these changes, the board will be able to investigate about 20 to 25 accidents per year; about 12 of the investigations would be for smaller accidents, and the rest would be for larger accidents with more formal full studies.

Additional funding is also needed in other areas, Bresland notes. CSB needs to hire a blast and explosives modeling expert, he says, rather than trying to rely on contract hiring. “Almost every accident investigation needs this expertise, and there are a limited number of experts,” he explains. “Often we find experts, but it turns out there is a conflict of interest since the experts are often working for companies. We need our own.”

CSB must also fill its full complement of five board members; it currently has two open spots. This group approves all reports and presents them to the public. CSB, which has been at least one board member short for nearly three years, must wait for the Administration to make appointments.

Also, the board wants to hire more administrative and legal staff to screen accidents and address growing legal issues. For instance, in a single day, CSB has filed as many as seven subpoenas seeking information from reluctant companies. It also intends to hire a director of operations. If successful, all these changes would take the board from a staff of 40 to about 55.

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