CSB Releases Optima Belle Safety Video

Yesterday the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) announced that the Board had released a new safety video describing the December 2020 fatal explosion and fire at the Optima Belle chemical facility in Belle, West Virginia. The new safety video, called “Outsourcing Responsibility: Explosion at Optima Belle,” includes an animation of the events leading to the incident and an analysis of the root cause of the incident.

This incident was just another in the long series of incidents that the CSB has investigated over the years that involved essentially unregulated self-reactive chemicals. Yesterday’s announcement notes that:

“Among other important issues, the CSB’s report [link added] and the new video point out that although CDB-56 is a reactive chemical that can undergo a self-accelerating decomposition when heated, it and many other such reactive chemicals are not regulated under OSHA’s Process Safety Management (PSM) standard or the EPA’s Risk Management Program (RMP) rule. Consequently, the CSB recommended that OSHA amend the PSM standard to achieve more comprehensive control of reactive hazards that could have catastrophic consequences and that EPA amend the RMP rule to explicitly cover catastrophic reactive hazards that have the potential to seriously impact the public.”