Few Regulations : Toxic Fires: Peril Can Be Anywhere

Engine Company No. 5 had already dragged a fire hose up to what appeared to be an ordinary warehouse fire in Anaheim last month when the company officer, preparing to order the firemen inside, spotted a sign on a side door: “Warning. Pesticide Storage.” Eerie green and blue flames were snaking out the windows. The firefighters dropped back quickly.

Within hours, a cloud of deadly vapors had made its way over a nearby trailer park and the evacuation of the first of 7,500 Anaheim residents was under way. Doctors at a nearby hospital began telephoning the Fire Department to find out what their patients had been breathing.

The response from the hazardous materials team at the scene: “Generally, they’re dealing with pesticides, some oxidizers and some nitrates. . . . We’re not really sure.”

Replay in Thermal

Less than four days later, firefighters in Riverside County were battling a similar pesticides warehouse fire in Thermal, where 2,000 residents were evacuated in the path of a caustic cloud of chemical vapors. Although firefighters had inspected the warehouse recently and had a general idea of what was inside, the fire burned for nearly two hours before they had a complete list of the chemicals.

Although emergency agencies evacuated both areas without loss of life or serious injury, the incidents raised questions about whether companies should be required to keep up-to-date information about their hazardous materials on file with emergency response officials, something vigorously opposed by the chemical manufacturing industry. They also focused attention on the fact that there is little or no state regulation of the storage of dangerous chemicals.

“I believe very strongly that we should know where the hell these bombs are,” Anaheim Mayor Don Roth said after the fire.

‘Could Happen Anywhere’

“But when you think about this a second, if you really want to crack down on the danger, we’re going to have to move out every nursery that has this stuff in hand, every discount department store, all these people who handle and sell fertilizers. It’s not like this is contraband material or anything,” Roth said. “I think this incident could happen anywhere, any place in California, today.”

The chemicals involved in the Anaheim and Thermal fires--relatively common pesticides like malathion, paraquat, parathion, diazinon--are among the most deadly substances produced by man. Many are derivatives of World War II nerve gases designed to attack the central nervous system. Most can be fatal if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in sufficient quantity.

“People have made it clear they don’t want the military storing chemical warfare weapons in their neighborhoods, but these (pesticides) are the same kinds of chemicals,” said attorney Ralph Lightstone of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of a number of groups calling for better regulation of pesticides and other dangerous materials.

Eight California counties--Lake, Nevada, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Yolo--and 43 cities have adopted ordinances requiring businesses to file regularly updated inventories of their hazardous materials with emergency response agencies. Anaheim and Thermal are not among them. Nor are any other major cities in California except San Diego, Riverside, Irvine and San Jose.

Even these disclosure ordinances may not require chemical companies to reveal all of the chemical ingredients of pesticides, because some of the chemicals are considered trade secrets protected by federal law, according Rex Magee, associate director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

“If we don’t know what’s there, we don’t know how to protect ourselves, we don’t know how to protect the workers. It’s all guesswork,” said Harry Steimer, general manager of the California State Firemen’s Assn. “It’s kind of like subjecting yourself to a booby trap. Our job is hard enough already, but when the hazard is added to by things such as the unknown, then it just compounds the whole situation.”

Anaheim Fire Capt. Robert Hirst, the company officer who spotted the danger signs that stopped firefighters from entering what could have been a deadly conflagration, had only recently completed a training course in hazardous materials management.

“We had just been made very much aware through our training that the most severe toxic hazard that would ever present itself to us would be a fire in an agricultural pesticide building, and here it was,” he said.

The Larry Fricker Co., owner of the Anaheim warehouse, did not release a full list of chemicals stored at the site until Tuesday, nearly 10 days after the fire.

The state firemen’s association and other state firefighters’ groups are supporting a new bill by Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) that would require companies to disclose inventories of hazardous materials, train employees in the handling of such materials and prepare community response plans for possible emergencies.

“Clearly, the events of the last week, plus all the other events in past years, are a compelling argument for us to act immediately on this problem,” Waters said. “Up to today, the events have been serious but not deadly; unfortunately, tomorrow may be too late.”

‘It’s Very Difficult’

Industry officials say, however, that so-called “right to know” ordinances threaten their ability to protect secret formulas in what is a highly competitive industry, and most favor an approach that would allow emergency officials to visit plants and warehouses to make plans for emergencies without the need for detailed information on chemical ingredients.

“We’re wrestling with this, but it’s a very difficult issue to grapple with,” said Brad Hayes of the California Manufacturers Assn., which opposes Waters’ bill.

The state fire marshal reported 1,194 toxic chemical fires in 1984, with injuries to 55 firefighters and 40 civilians, two of them fatal. Agricultural chemicals were involved in 165 of those fires, testimony to the wide array of companies potentially involved in such incidents, ranging from pool chemical companies and paint manufacturers to high-tech research and chemical manufacturing firms.

The fires last week, along with the disastrous chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in December, 1984, and the gas plant explosion in Mexico City a month earlier, have prompted many officials to begin re-examining state regulation of industrial chemicals, a process that has raised some serious issues. For example:

- Although there is a wide range of regulation imposed on the use, transportation and disposal of hazardous waste, there is little or no state regulation of hazardous materials, dangerous chemicals in their raw forms, before they are converted to waste. Most regulations on storage of chemicals exist only as a result of local fire codes that are not coordinated on a statewide basis, except for those communities that elect to adopt the state’s uniform fire code.

Limited Authority

Although the state Department of Food and Agriculture regulates the sale and use of pesticides, for example, “we have no authority over what is stored or how it is stored. . . . All we do is check to see if the materials are in approved containers and have approved labels,” Magee said.

The state Department of Health Services regulates producers of hazardous waste, which health officials say includes most hazardous materials handlers as well, because users of raw chemicals usually convert them to waste during the manufacturing process. Yet health officials in recent interviews could cite no warehousing regulations in the department’s enforcement codes.

The Larry Fricker Co. warehouse did have a health permit for hazardous waste, but it applied only to the waste motor oil removed from forklifts at the company.

“It’s one of the real ironies to a lot of us in this business that waste materials are controlled a lot more stringently than raw materials, when in a lot of cases, the raw materials are at least as dangerous or more dangerous than wastes,” noted Robert Griffith, chief of Orange County’s recently formed hazardous materials program.

- Enforcement of local fire codes is spotty. The Los Angeles Fire Department conducts seven-times-per-year inspections at potentially hazardous sites, but other cities do not have the manpower for such frequent inspections. Although Anaheim tries to conduct fire inspections at least once a year, authorities apparently last inspected the Larry Fricker Co. in June, 1983.

Post-Inspection Changes

Many fire officials say even regular inspections cannot prevent accidents when businesses, seeking to protect secret chemical formulas, fail to tell fire inspectors about all chemicals on site or change conditions at a plant after inspections are completed.

- State officials have no idea of the number and location of plants and businesses in California that could be subject to a chemical leak, spill, explosion or fire, according to Mark Ashcraft of the Department of Industrial Relations.

Although state occupational health and safety regulations exist to protect workers and the environment of the workplace, “there just doesn’t seem to be anybody that’s totally in control” in the event that surrounding neighborhoods are affected, Ashcraft said. “Maybe all the local response plans with local government are wonderful. We don’t know that. No one knows that, and that’s what makes you worry. If you have a tank of these materials that somehow ruptures in a plant, and then like in Bhopal it leaks out in the wind, are we prepared for that?”

The South Coast Air Quality Management District is undertaking a survey, scheduled for completion by mid-July, of Southern California sites that could be subject to accidental releases of toxic gas. The state Office of Emergency Services is updating its statewide response plan for hazardous materials incidents. And Assemblyman Byron Sher (D-Palo Alto) wants the Legislature to pay for a $100,000 study of accidental toxic gas releases before developing laws to regulate the storage of toxic gases.

Problem Acknowledged

“We’ve got a problem, and we know it. The . . . recent fires reveal that,” conceded John Browning, executive director of the Western Agricultural Chemical Assn., an industry group that is scheduling additional safety seminars throughout the Western United States as a result of the fires at Anaheim, Thermal and a similar fire at a Chevron Chemical Co. plant in Fresno last year.

Industry spokesmen said they might favor regulations requiring disclosure of chemical inventories to fire departments, if they could be assured that members of the public--and their competitors--would have no access to the information.

These spokesmen questioned, however, whether firefighters really need detailed lists of all chemicals at a given plant, contending that reports already required under worker safety laws--known as material safety data sheets--are kept at plant sites and list most, but not all hazardous chemicals and how they should be handled in an emergency.

For chemicals protected from disclosure because they are trade secrets, manufacturers must list at least the potential hazards on the data sheets, according to industry spokesmen, including George Jardim, health and safety coordinator for the Chevron Chemical Co. in San Francisco.

“We may have a foot and a half of these sheets at some our plants.” Jardim said. “Even if these fire people could maintain a library of these things, what do they do if they show up at a fire and they have 400 sheets? What is burning and what isn’t burning? I think the idea of just totally giving these things to the fire department is an impractical idea.”

Favors Inspections

Instead, Jardim said, Chevron officials encourage local fire department teams to visit plants frequently and develop response plans to be followed in the event of an emergency.

“In general, what I like to do is say, ‘Fire department, you come in and look at our plant and tell us what you need. What is most useful to you?’ It may be that the most hazardous material is only present infrequently, and in minute quantities, and we then give them information on which we both agree.”

In effect, that is just what is happening in those cities and counties where fire departments are aggressively trying to plan their responses. Almost universally, however, these firefighters say they need more information. They complain that although such information may be available in bits and pieces through several agencies, they need clear, concise data that is quickly retrievable.

Several of these fire prevention experts explained that without a mandatory reporting system that requires companies to log and report changes in warehousing contents, firefighters will continue to respond to a fire alarm at a building that last month contained shoes or lawn furniture only to find it is now used to store chemicals.

For the most part, local fire agencies say they are relying on their own resources to hold dangers to a minimum.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department, for example, is credited with one of the best chemical fire prevention programs in the state. A special petrochemical unit conducts four annual inspections of hazardous chemical warehouses. In addition, individual engine companies do three more yearly inspections at each site. The inspections include checks of chemical inventories, building floor plans, access and water availability information.

Warning Signs

Warehouses are labeled with warning signs indicating how flammable the materials are, how reactive they are to water and what special hazards they present. Firefighters called to a scene who see such signs are immediately alerted to summon the county’s hazardous materials response team, similar to the Orange County team that was called to the Anaheim site after firefighters noticed the warning sign. Team members each have about 400 hours of special training in combating chemical accidents.

The Orange County Fire Department operates a similar, though somewhat less extensive, inspection and planning program, and the department is in the process of setting up a computerized inventory of hazardous materials that will include all companies in the unincorporated areas and 10 of the county’s 26 cities. But because Orange County, like Los Angeles County, has no mandatory disclosure ordinance, information is restricted to those chemicals that companies voluntarily disclose during fire inspections.

“We find that most businesses are relatively willing to provide the information and are fairly cooperative. But you always have a few shady characters who are trying to hide what they’re doing, or who are uncooperative, and they’re usually the ones that cause the trouble,” said Griffith of Orange County’s newly created hazardous waste program office.

Santa Clara County, including the City of San Jose, not only requires companies to disclose inventories of hazardous materials but also requires them to provide emergency contact phone numbers, a facility map showing where hazardous materials are stored and a plan to monitor chemicals stored in underground tanks to prevent and detect leakage.

Fees charged to businesses in San Jose to help administer the program, based on the type and quantity of chemicals involved, range from $40 to several thousand dollars a year.

Ability ‘Quite Good’

In the long run, however, many of those most closely involved in regulating hazardous materials say they can never hope to prevent hazardous materials accidents entirely.

“It’s hard for people to learn a lesson like that after something like this (the Anaheim and Thermal incidents), because the immediate reaction is something should be done so that nothing like this ever happens again,” Griffith said.

“I think one of the major lessons from the Anaheim incident is that in fact our ability to safely respond to these situations is quite good. We did not have a Bhopal, India-type situation here. What we had was some inconvenience; people were out of their homes for two or three days. But even with what was potentially a very big, very dangerous problem, we were able to handle it in a way that kept the impact to an absolute minimum,” he said.

“What I’m saying is that instead of increasing the hysteria and concern in the community, there should be some understanding that we’re going to have these situations, but we know how to manage them. . . . To a major degree, there has to be some acceptance by the public that that’s part of the price for living in the society we live in.”

REGULATING HAZARDOUS MATERIALS

Jurisdictions in Southern California approach the question of regulating the manufacture and storage of hazardous materials differently:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY: No mandatory disclosure ordinance; quarterly building inspections, plus three annual pre-fire planning inspections; buildings must display chemical hazard warning placards; has two hazard-material response teams. CITY OF LOS ANGELES: No disclosure ordinance; conducts annual inspections; engine companies do extensive pre-fire planning; chemical hazard warning placards required on warehouses; has four hazard materials response teams. CITY OF SANTA MONICA: Has a disclosure ordinance; does annual inspections and pre-fire planning; warehouses have hazard warning placards to alert responding firemen; no hazardous materials response team. ORANGE COUNTY: No disclosure ordinance; attempts to inventory hazardous chemicals during annual inspections; some pre-fire planning on larger “target” warehouses; has one hazardous materials response team. ANAHEIM: No disclosure ordinance; does annual inspections and companies are asked to list hazardous chemicals, but only 5% comply; is starting a hazardous material response team. SAN DIEGO COUNTY: Has a disclosure ordinance, run by county Health Department; information available to city and county fire departments; the county has no fire department. CITY OF SAN DIEGO: Has disclosure ordinance; is implementing uniform inspection system. SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY: No disclosure ordinance; each engine company develops own inspection and pre-fire plans; county Health Department has hazardous material response team. CITY OF SAN BERNARDINO: No disclosure ordinance; does semi-annual inspections; limited pre-fire planning, no hazardous material response team. RIVERSIDE COUNTY: No mandatory disclosure ordinance; does annual inspections; has no list of hazardous materials stored; no hazard material response team. CITY OF RIVERSIDE: Has a disclosure ordinance; does annual inspections and pre-fire planning, has no hazardous material response team.