CSB Releases New Accident Report Summary Product

Yesterday the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) announced the publication of the first volume of a new safety product, INCIDENT REPORTS. These are collections of short reports about chemical incidents reported via the Board’s Accidental Release Reporting systems. The first volume of this new product covers 26 incident that were reported between April 2020 and September 2023.

The ‘Summary’ that leads off the report provides an abstract from the Accidental Release Reporting Rule Data spreadsheet that the Board periodically updates. It also notes that:

“This volume of Incident Reports covers 26 accidental release events in 15 states. These events resulted in 5 fatalities, 17 serious injuries, and approximately $697 million in property damage.”

Each incident report includes a brief description of the incident and probable cause statement. Those probable cause statements are based upon investigations conducted by the facility, other regulatory agencies, and/or Board investigators. These mini-reports (typically one or two pages) do not have the scope of the Board’s incident investigation reports, but apply the same expertise and experience to looking at the proximate causes of these incidents.

Most of the incidents covered in this volume happened at large facilities. These are the types of facilities that would be expected to have significant safety expertise in house to help prevent these types of incidents, but also have a much large set of, and wider variety of, equipment that could fail. These incidents do have lessons for all sorts of facilities that make or utilize hazardous chemicals, but it would be helpful if future volumes included more small facility incidents in the mix.

There were a total of 316 chemical incidents reported to the CSB during the period covered by this initial report. There is nothing in the announcement nor in the report that indicates how they selected these 26 incidents. It is unclear how often CSB intends to issue these reports, or how much in the way of resources this new effort is consuming. This volume has a wealth of chemical safety related information that would be valuable to all industrial chemical users, but if it seriously detracts from the Board’s investigative duties, a serious discussion will have to be had on which type product would be a better use of their resources.

Smallest chemical release covered: 100 milliliters of silicon tetrachloride at Wacker Polysilicon on July 24, 2020.

Final note: It will be interesting to see where these volumes end up on the CSB’s website.