The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB)
published a meeting notice in today’s Federal Register (
80 FR
42085-42086) for a public meeting to be held in Washington, DC on July 22
nd,
2015. The status of several on-going investigations
will be discussed,
including the final report on the
Caribbean
Petroleum accident.
Meeting
According to the CSB web site the following topics will be
addressed:
∙ Updates on current CSB investigations;
∙ The final report, recommendations, and public comments received
on the Caribbean Petroleum incident, a massive fire at an oil storage facility
in Puerto Rico in 2009. The Board may then vote on the Caribbean
Petroleum report;
∙ A staff presentation on the calendared recommendation to BP
resulting from the CSB’s investigation into the 2005 BP America refinery
explosion in Texas City, TX; and
∙ Staff
reports on recommendations related to California’s draft Process Safety
Management rules and
laboratory
safety guidelines from the American Chemical Society.
The meeting is open to the public and there is no mention of
any requirements for advanced registration. For those not able to attend in
person there will be a
phone
participation option. After the Board completes the agenda items there will
be time for
public
statements limited to 5 minutes or less. Written statements for the record
may be submitted at the meeting or provided to Hillary J. Cohen, Communications
Manager,
hillary.cohen@csb.gov.
Other Issues
People who have been following the CSB will be well aware of
numerous personnel issues that have been plaguing the Board for the last couple
of years. They are now down to just two active members (a new Chair and another
new member have been nominated and are going through the Senate confirmation
process). This combined with
conflicts
between the Board and the CSB staff has undoubtedly affected the performance of
the CSB.
Of much more concern have been the allegations of misconduct
of some of the
past
and current Board members. More recently there have been allegations of
contract
improprieties perpetrated by the self-declared “interim executive and
administrative authority”. Exacerbating these issues is the
open
conflict between the two remaining Board members. NOTE: Thanks to
Richard
Rosera for
pointing
me at these last two articles.
The underfunded CSB has a good historical record of
investigating serious chemical process and handling accidents, determining root
causes of those accidents and turning that information into both specific and
broad industry guidelines for improving chemical process safety. The current
problems need to be resolved before they have a permanent effect on the Board’s
ability to perform its valuable and necessary function.
I am not generally a big fan of congressional
investigations, but these problems have reached the point where congressional
oversight is probably going to be the only thing that can prevent some of the
current calls for the disbanding of the Board to be put into operation.
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