While President Joe Biden has nominated three people to the independent board that investigates chemical accidents, supporters of the Chemical Safety Board said other steps also must be taken so the agency properly can do its job.
A letter from 22 unions, environmental groups and other advocacy organizations to Chair Katherine Lemos, the last remaining member of the board, called for more investigators, addressing the backlog of probes, publishing the names of those killed in accidents, and protecting unauthorized workers, who can provide needed details, from the threat of deportation.
“The information that they put out is used by the entire universe from industry to advocates,” said Debra Coyle McFadden, executive director of the New Jersey Work Environment Council, one of the groups signing the letter. “That’s why it’s still critically important that they’re able to fulfill their mission.”
The board is important to New Jersey, the 10th largest chemical producer in the U.S., whose $13.4 billion chemical industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the state, according to the American Chemistry Council.
A board spokeswoman, Sabrina Morris, said the agency was reviewing the letter.
The groups were not alone in expressing concern about the chemical board. Both Democratic and Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by its chair, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-6th Dist, asked Lemos in May whether a lack of staffing and board members has interfered with the chemical safety board’s operations.
Advocates said the changes they recommended could be made within the board’s existing $12 million budget. For example, the board now has only 12 investigators, the lowest number in recent years, according to the groups signing the letter, which also include United Steelworkers Union, National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, Union of Concerned Scientists, AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club.
The five-member board was down to only Lemos after then-President Donald Trump stopped filling vacancies when Congress rejected his efforts to kill the agency, born out of an explosion at a Lodi pharmaceutical manufacturing plant more than two decades ago and championed by the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat.
The agency gives chemical explosions the same attention that the National Transportation Safety Board gives to plane crashes and truck accidents. The Chemical Safety Board investigates accidents, comes up with probable causes, and makes recommendations to prevent repeat disasters.
The board has 19 ongoing investigations dating back to 2016, according to its website.
“People’s lives could depend on it,” said former board member Rick Engler, who came to the agency from the N.J. Work Environment Council. “There hasn’t been an investigation recently in New Jersey but if there ever had to be one, it’s important that the agency is capable of an effective response. That’s unclear right now.”
Biden announced three nominees in April, and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over the board, is working with the administration to confirm them.
“It’s an agency that really unfortunately has been underfunded,” McFadden said. “Not only does it need to have more board members but it’s also the inspectors, the staff. We need people to go out when we have these horrific events, and many times they’re preventable events.”
The safety board was created in the 1990 Clean Air Act, but lay dormant for years until the April 1995 explosion at the Napp Technologies pharmaceutical plant in Lodi. Five workers were killed, nearby buildings were destroyed, and a plume of toxic smoke drifted north and west, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people.
Board investigations included the 2010 explosion at the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers and is considered the biggest offshore oil spill in history, and the 2013 explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant that killed 15 and injured more than 200.
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Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him at @JDSalant.
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