Toxic Safety: No Room on the Bottom Line

The tragedy of the accident at Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, India, and the fears aroused by an incident at the Carbide plant in Institute, W. Va., brought welcome public attention to the chemical industry’s handling of lethal compounds. Yet in work sites across the country, business goes on as usual, too often with safety rules skipped or ignored, with inadequate safeguards or safety training. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that in the past five years there have been 6,928 accidental releases of chemicals in this country, causing nearly 140 deaths, 4,700 injuries and the evacuation of 217,000 people.

Practical, uncomplicated improvements in plant equipment and safety procedures could have prevented loss of life and health in most of these accidents. Example: In December the storage tank at Kerr-McGee’s plant in Gore, Okla., blew up after being overfilled and then heated. The tank had no alarms or safety relief valves to relieve excess pressure, according to company officials.

That accident, in which one man died, shows how crucial it can be to have dual systems for all important measurements. The tank was placed on a scale in order to tell operators how much had been pumped into it. But there was no back-up system to double-check the reading from the scale. It apparently malfunctioned and misled the operators into overfilling the tank. All that was needed was a flow meter on the loading line, like those found on gasoline pumps. If the flow meter had given a different reading than the scale, the operators would have known of the overfill problem in time.

A few well-designed plants have such equipment as dual temperature sensors or pressure gauges on all critical components. They use advanced telemetry to bring all the data to a central control room. They use computers to sense and react to out-of-the-ordinary conditions before they become critical. They have back-up treatment devices, such as scrubbers to neutralize vapors or containment tanks to trap them in the event of a release.

But as we approach the 21st Century, most of the chemical industry still uses 19th-Century concepts of plumbing. Model plants are the exception, not the rule.

Why does so much of the industry lag behind on safety measures? The main reason appears to be that the pressure of competition can make safety a secondary concern; and safety expenditures don’t contribute to profit.

While almost no businessman will tolerate a safety lapse that is guaranteed to hurt someone, resolve weakens as the danger becomes less certain and less immediate. If you cannot be sure that your competitors will do the same, it may seem foolish to put money into safety equipment for something that may never happen. The more remote the chance, the more likely the company will gamble that it can dodge the bullet.

But with so many operations nationwide, the accident record continues to mount: 7,000 in five years, four to five a day.

This is a classic case for government regulation. The government must step in and mandate that all businesses use the safety equipment and practices that the industry leaders have already demonstrated. By making all firms toe the same mark, government can remove the economic disadvantage in being careful and the advantage in cutting corners.

This is exactly why we have a Federal Aviation Agency to set minimum rules for safe aircraft design, operation and maintenance, and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do the same for atomic power plants. Neither agency is perfect, but both industries are safer than they would be without oversight.

For chemical accidents, however, the Environmental Protection Agency is nowhere to be seen. Since Bhopal, EPA’s only action has been to publish a list of 402 acutely toxic chemicals and advise people to get out of the way if poison gas clouds come rolling across their communities.

EPA has thus far avoided any responsibility for actually preventing accidents--something that a high political appointee in the agency recently called a contradiction in terms. Another EPA official suggested that people get used to the fact that accidents will happen. EPA’s official policy, announced in June, 1985, “emphasizes preparing the public to safeguard itself.” Despite the availability of safety measures, EPA would have you believe that nothing can be done by government, and little can be done at all, to stem the continuing toll of casualties from poison gas leaks.

Just calling something an “accident,” however, does not make it unpredictable or unpreventable. Accidents have causes, and causes can be prevented.

EPA should be promoting and requiring the use of safety measures.

With EPA unwilling to act, the task falls to Congress. A Toxic Release Control Act has been introduced by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) and James J. Florio (D-N.J.). But the legislation will stay bottled up unless the public demands action. No one should condone an official attitude of “accidents will happen.” That’s a gamble none of us should have to take.