CSB Sends Investigators to McArthur, OH Nitrogen Oxide Release

Yesterday the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) announced that it had sent an team of investigators to McArthur, OH to look into the nitrogen oxide release at the Austin Powder Explosives Facility. (see news reports: here, here, here, and here). No injuries have yet been reported, nor have any significant damages been described. This incident has attracted attention because of the wide area (if not the number of people) affected by the evacuation order and the fact that the FAA felt it necessary to declare a large (30 nautical mile) no fly zone because of the incident.

The sending of this team to the site has not yet make this an official CSB investigation. The team will be looking for information about the incident that would make this worthy of a CSB investigation. This is the major difference between the CSB and various regulatory agencies that will also have teams on site. Those agencies will be looking to determine if the company crossed all of the regulatory t’s and dotted all of the compliance i’s. For those agencies finding violations and assessing fines will be the order of the day, and they will undoubtedly succeed. There are always minor (and unfortunately frequently not so minor) violations to be found.

The CSB team, on the other hand, will be looking to understand how and why this incident occurred and whether there are lessons to be learned that will help prevent similar incidents in McArthur and at other facilities storing nitric acid. Interestingly, it is possible (but exceedingly unlikely) that ATF, OSHA and other regulatory agencies could find that the company complied with all of the appropriate regulatory requirements, and thus could not be fined for this incident. Regulations are founded upon a combination of past experience and political maneuverings. A CSB investigation, however, could inform future regulatory actions. That was the reason that Congress established the requirement for the establishment of the Chemical Safety Board, they wanted an investigative agency to look at serious chemical incidents without worrying about what regulations may or may not have been violated, but to get to the base cause of the accident. The CSB can make recommendations about how to prevent future occurrences without worrying about the limits of regulatory authority or the political ramifications of those recommendations. Regulatory agencies can then take (or not) those recommendations and grind them into regulatory sausage.