CSB Complains About Polymer Company’s Failure to Act on Recommendations

Yesterday, the CSB released a commentary on the failure of Yenkin-Majestic/OPC Polymers to implement -- or even substantively respond to – any of the five safety recommendations issued by the CSB stemming from the agency’s investigation of the fatal April 2021 explosion and fire at the company’s Columbus, Ohio resin plant. 

The incident occurred in March of 2021 and resulted in one fatality, and eight personnel transported to local hospitals for treatment as well as over $90 million in damages. The CSB published their report on the incident in December 2023. That report listed seven recommendations made by the Board to help prevent future occurrences of this type of incident. Four of those recommendations were assigned to Yenkin-Majestic. In September of last year, the CSB updated the status of each of those recommendations to ‘Open – Unacceptable Response/No Response Received’. 

Part of the reason for the lack of response may have been the pending criminal charges that had been filed against the company for violating the negligent endangerment provision of the Clean Air Act for an explosion that killed one employee and injured many more (42 U.S.C. § 7413(c)(4)). The company may have felt that responding to the CSB’s recommendations would have been used as an admission of guilt in those proceedings. According to the DOJ, the company pleaded guilty to that charge on September 1st, 2026. 

On August 18th, 2026, the Yenkin-majestic Paint Corporation, was dissolved. Operations of OPC Polymers were transferred to a new, stand-alone entity, OPC Polymers LLC, operating in partnership with Multiquimica Dominicana. One would like to think that responsibility for implementing the recommendations would now fall upon that LLC.