CSB Publishes Vol 2 of Chemical Incident Reports

Yesterday the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) announced the publication of the second 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 May 2020 to August 2024. The first volume of this series was released in January of this year.

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 25 accidental release events in 14 states. These events resulted in 7 fatalities, 23 serious injuries, and approximately $1 billion 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. While much of the analysis is provided by Board investigators, the data used in that analysis comes from company led incident investigations (in a couple of instances investigation data from outside agencies like OSHA was also used).

While the CSB is to be commended on the publication of these reports, acknowledgement of the role the affected companies in conducting incident investigations and their willingness to share the information with the public should certainly be mentioned. Without those efforts, these publications would not be possible.