Reader Comment - Chemical Investigations in 2024

Yesterday, I received an interesting email from a long time reader pointing me at an article about the Chemical Safety Board on BloombergLaw.com. The article pointed at the dearth of new chemical investigations initiated while the CSB was working on their backlog of uncompleted investigation reports, projecting that “the CSB will be much less conservative with investigative deployments in the coming year”.

The article specifically noted that:

“While more incidents would seem to beget more federal probes, CSB didn’t deploy to a single incident in fiscal 2023 and only deployed once in fiscal 2022. Historically, the CSB has typically deployed to four to six major accidents a year. Due to staffing issues, turnover, and a lack of presidentially appointed and congressionally confirmed board members, unfinished investigations got backlogged. This has attracted the attention of Congress, environmentalists, and community activist groups.”

While the opening sentence is technically true, there were news reports of investigator deployments to accidents in 2023, the CSB did actually open a new investigation: Martinez Renewable Fuels Fire, Martinez, CA, November 19^th, 2023.

The article then went on to note that early in 2023 the CBS updated its “Drivers of Critical Chemical Safety Change” to include: “the topics of reactive hazards, inherently safer design, and a slew of subtopics aiming to focus the agency on fence line community impact and extreme weather. Inherently safer design aims to avoid or reduce hazards up front instead of relying on managing and controlling those hazards after the fact.” Unfortunately, looking at that page today, we see a completely different set topics discussed.

While the topics are different, they remain important aspects of chemical safety that the Board, and industry should remain cognizant of going forward.

As a former CSB investigator privately noted:

“This is REALLY good to hear. The slate is clean. There are only three investigative folks currently at the CSB that I had the chance to serve with. And these three were the best. Everyone else is new. So it’s almost like at the start of the agency’s mission, where they had to determine what they were going to do and how. There is very little legacy.  And that might be a really good thing.”