=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #408
—September 22, 1994—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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CHEMICAL ACCIDENTS
The chemical industry consists of more than 12,000 manufacturing
plants in the U.S., producing a total of more than 66,000
different commonly-used chemicals. [1, pg.III-6]
During the past 30 years, individual chemical plants have grown
larger–often increasing 10-fold in size–to take advantage of
economies of scale. A chemical plant today will typically
produce 300,000 to 600,000 metric tonnes (660 million to 1.3
billion pounds) of product per year. Storage tanks at a plant
may hold as much as 1.5 million barrels (75 million gallons) of
product or raw material.
Chemical plants are complex, tightly-coupled operations.
Tightly-coupled means one event or process affects another event
or process directly and quickly, thus making human intervention
difficult when something goes wrong. Complex means that events
cannot be predicted reliably because many different things can go
wrong in many different ways. This is why every chemical plant
in the world is an accident waiting to happen.
During the last 30 years, while plants have grown larger, many
corporate managers have adopted policies that increase the chance
of an accident:
** The spacing of process equipment within plants has been
reduced, to save money on energy, piping, and instrumentation.
** During the 1980s, faced with the worst recession in 50 years,
the chemical industry laid off thousands of workers, thus
reducing the numbers of knowledgeable people paying attention to
various processes.
** In order to diminish the power of labor unions, petrochemical
corporations in the 1980s began replacing regular employees with
contract laborers, temporary workers who move from site to site,
rarely gaining in-depth experience. According to Nicholas
Ashford at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], “well
over 30%” of the hours worked in the petrochemical industry are
now logged by contract employees. Contract employees lack the
process-specific experience of many of the workers they have
replaced.
** Meanwhile in recent years, chemical plants have been run, in
some cases, in excess of 100% of their “official”
capacities. [1,pg.III-8]
** Finally, in some instances, it is obvious even to an outsider
that corporate owners are letting their plants decay. You need
only to drive along the Niagara River in Niagara Falls, N.Y., to
see fully-operating plants that are not being maintained, or
repaired properly, or even painted, as they rust, decay and
deteriorate with time.
As you might expect, there is evidence that the frequency of
chemical accidents has increased in recent years. According to
Nicholas Ashford, a survey of the largest property losses over
the past 30 years indicates a five-fold increase in the average
loss (calculated in constant dollars, taking inflation into
account). A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) notes that, in the post-World War II
period, the incidence of major industrial accidents was only one
every 5 years or so, until 1980. Since 1980, the incidence has
risen to two major accidents per year. Thus, according to the
OECD, the frequency of major chemical accidents has increased
10-fold in recent years. [1, pg.III-9]
However, it is not major accidents that affect the largest number
of people. It is the smaller, more routine accidents that expose
workers, emergency response personnel, the general public,
wildlife, soil and water to toxic chemicals.
When a reporter sets out to examine routine chemical accidents,
he or she quickly learns that there are no reliable data. Three
databases are nationwide in scope and contain information on
toxic chemical accidents, but each database is flawed in some
major way. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for
example, maintains records of worker accidents–but they omit
injuries to contract workers who, as we have seen, represent at
least 30% of the total workforce in the chemical industry.
(Injuries to petrochemical contract workers are reported under
various categories in the construction industries.) Since
contract workers are more accident-prone than regular employees
who have learned the ropes during years spent at a plant, the BLS
database substantially under-reports workplace injuries in
petrochemical plants.
The other databases suffer from flaws that are similar or worse.
The National Environmental Law Center (NELC) examined one of the
national accident databases for the period 1988-1992. They
studied the Emergency Response and Notification System [ERNS]
database, maintained by EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency].
The NELC staff did not summarize the entire ERNS database; for
example, they only gathered data on about 800 out of 66,000
chemicals commonly in use. Furthermore, they omitted data on
accidents involving only petroleum products (fuel oil, gasoline
and so forth)–which means they omitted 52% of the ERNS data.
Still, what they found is impressively large. NELC reports that
during the 5-year period, 34,500 accidents involving toxic
chemicals were reported to ERNS; this means that, on average, a
toxic chemical accident was reported 19 times per day in the
U.S., or nearly once every hour. [2, pg.1]
To get an idea of how badly the ERNS database may underestimate
the chemical accident picture, its data can be compared to a more
thorough study conducted by the Attorney General’s office in New
York state. [3] The New York study examined records from EPA, the
New York Department of Conservation, the U.S. Coast Guard, the
New York Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and a private
newsletter.
The New York study found that a total of 3496 toxic chemical
accidents occurred in New York state during the 3-year period,
1988-1990. During this same 3-year period, only 496 New York
accidents were reported to the ERNS database. If this kind of
under-reporting is typical of the ERNS database, then the true
picture of chemical accidents in the U.S. may approach 240,000
chemical accidents per year, or 130 per day, or 5 per hour around
the clock.
Despite astonishingly poor data, it seems safe to say that
chemical accidents are a large, and probably growing, problem.
Nicholas Ashford at MIT has described a fundamental solution,
which he calls primary prevention. Primary prevention means
designing chemical processes to eliminate the possibility of an
accident; secondary prevention reduces the probability of an
accident.[1,pg.III-1]
The bulk of Ashford’s report (which was funded by EPA) describes
how industry might change from its present emphasis on secondary
prevention (add-on safety systems, such as sprinklers, leak
detectors and double-walled tanks) to an emphasis on primary
prevention (designing plants so they rely less on toxic,
volatile, flammable, or reactive chemicals, and so they operate
at reduced temperatures and pressures).
Ashford finds that technology-forcing regulations can help, i.e.,
regulations that require industry to do things that they say they
cannot do today. Ashford finds that the chemical industry has a
decent record for innovating when the law says it must.
Toxic tort (injury) lawsuits can be another beneficial force,
prompting industry to innovate, Ashford says.
Government enforcement of worker safety laws is presently NOT an
effective inducement for industry to change its ways, Ashford
finds. Regulatory fines for OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health
Act] violations averaged only $75 per violation during the period
1970-1980 and then dropped even lower during the Reagan years.
The median OSHA fine following a death or serious injury accident
in 1990 was only $890 (less than half what it had been in 1972,
after the figures are adjusted for inflation).[1,pg.VI-1] Thus,
at present, it appears to be cheaper to kill and injure people
than to make chemical plants inherently safer.
Some argue that corporations, as presently structured, simply
cannot do the right thing. For example, when Union Carbide
killed somewhere between 3000 and 8000 citizens of Bhopal, India
in 1984 and injured somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 others,
they aggressively resisted demands for compensation. They
ultimately paid $520 million total ($470 million to the victims,
plus $50 million to Carbide’s lawyers). Just the economic damage
from the event (leaving aside the question of fair compensation
to the victims) was estimated to be $4.1 billion, so Carbide got
off incredibly lightly. Carbide said it accepted “moral
responsibility” for the catastrophe at Bhopal, yet it refused to
pay the real dollar costs.
Given the legal structure of corporations, Carbide had no choice,
says Ward Morehouse: “Had they been genuinely forthcoming and
made truly disinterested offers of help on a scale appropriate to
the magnitude of the disaster, they would almost certainly have
been confronted with suits by shareholders seeking to hold the
management accountable for mishandling company
funds….” [4, pg.490]
Furthermore, the stock market sends perverse signals to
corporations that create disasters. The day the $470 million
penalty against Carbide was announced, its stock rose $2.00 per
share.[4,pg.487] Last week when a jury awarded $5 billion to
victims of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon’s stock rose $1.50
per share. [5]
Whatever the solution to these problems turns out to be, the
nation will need more reliable data on chemical accidents. The
Clean Air Act of 1990 created a Chemical Safety and Hazard
Identification Board, charged with “investigating the causes of
chemical accidents, issuing reports to Congress and other federal
and state agencies, and proposing ways to reduce the risk of
injuries arising from the production and use of chemicals.”
Unfortunately, at present the Board has no effective budget, so
the very substantial benefits that it could provide may be lost
unless Congress takes action soon to give the Board the resources
it requires.
                
                
                
                
    
–Peter Montague
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[1] Nicholas A. Ashford and others, THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE FOR PREVENTING CHEMICAL ACCIDENTS: MOVING
FIRMS FROM SECONDARY PREVENTION AND MITIGATION TO PRIMARY
PREVENTION (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 1993). This insightful and even-handed report is
available free from the federal government’s EPCRA hotline
(1-800-535-0202); request “The Ashford Report”; expect delivery
in 2-3 weeks.
Descriptor terms: chemical industry; accidents; spills; leaks;
occupational safety and health; job safety; nicholas ashford;
massachusetts institute of technology; mit; oecd; bureau of labor
statistics; national environmental law center; nelc; emergency
response and notification system; erns; epa; studies; databases;
primary prevention; regulation; toxic torts litigation;
occupational safety and health act; chemical safety and hazard
identification board; union carbide; bhopal; fines; exxon valdex;
oil spills; corporations;