US Chemical Safety Board to close this year

THE Trump administration plans to close the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (US CSB) this year, sparking fears its loss will erode industrial safety and cost lives.

The president’s budget for October onwards proposes cancelling funding for the CSB, a federal agency that investigates industrial chemical accidents, shares lessons learned, and issues recommendations to help improve industrial safety and avoid often-fatal accidents from being repeated.

Lawmakers and industry have questioned the logic of the decision, noting that the modest savings made by zeroing out the agency’s US$14m annual budget will be dwarfed by the costs resulting from just one industrial accident that the CSB could have helped prevent.

In a letter urging Trump to reverse the decision, 26 Democrat congressmembers wrote: “The CSB has long received strong bipartisan support for saving taxpayers, and communities, far more than the small cost of prevention. As many devastating chemical incidents amass hundreds of millions of dollars in property and economic damages, the prevention of one disaster would save multiples of the CSB’s total [budget]. With US chemical accidents happening nearly every two days, we cannot afford to lose the CSB.”

Jan Tucker, director of the IChemE Safety Centre, said the absence of independent investigative resource will increase the risk that the contributing causes of industrial incidents will not be fully identified.

“The opportunity to share lessons more widely among other similar industries is also likely to be significantly reduced, and risk of recurrence elsewhere increased.”

A note published on the CSB website, explains that the move comes as part of efforts to reduce federal expenditure adding that the CSB “duplicates substantial capabilities in Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate chemical-related mishaps.”

Since it was created in 1998, the CSB has deployed expert investigators to more than 170 chemical incidents and made more than 1,000 recommendations to help improve safety. Its most recent investigations have shared lessons from a molten salt explosion that killed a worker in Tennessee and a spate of hydrogen fluoride leaks that killed one worker and seriously injured another in Louisiana.

The note on CSB website goes on to say: “CSB generates unprompted studies of the chemical industry and recommends policies that they have no authority to create or enforce. This function should reside within agencies that have authorities to issue regulations in accordance with applicable legal standards.”

Sean O'Sullivan, chair of IChemE’s Safety and Loss Prevention Special Interest Group, said: “CSB resources are some of the most well prepared, thorough and easily understood of any of the incident investigation publications available globally, and engineers of all nationalities have been learning lessons through the CSB for decades.

He added: “Its unusual remit, not as a regulator, but as a government agency without executive power has been successful, which its statistics for closed findings show. The forthcoming shutdown will be a huge loss to the process safety community and cannot be easily replaced by the private sector or academic institutions.”

Jordan Barab, former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA and longstanding safety commentator, took to social media to disagree with the proposed closure.

“Trump wants to shut down the Chemical Safety Board which has a unique role investigating chemical plant incidents. The result: more chemical releases, worker deaths and community pollution. All to save US$14 million. And to make the chemical industry happy.”

Yet the chemicals industry has not come out in support of the decision. The American Chemistry Council trade group said: “We value the work of the CSB and want to see it continue, and we will engage with the White House and Congress, so they understand we support the CSB as the budget works its way through the approval process.”