Silicon Valley Guidelines for Toxic Gas May Set Standard

After more than three years of haggling, environmentalists, firefighters and Silicon Valley computer makers have drafted an innovative set of criteria to stiffen and standardize regulation of toxic industrial gases.

The Santa Clara County Intergovernmental Council, a regional planning body, last week enlisted local city attorneys to draft formal ordinance language based on the outline. County toxic program coordinator Michael Giusti said the model ordinance should be ready for adoption by cities or counties by February or March.

Model for the Nation

The process to improve toxic-gas rules is reminiscent of an earlier Silicon Valley campaign that pioneered better regulation of underground toxics storage tanks. Those regulations led to stricter regulations for the entire state, and have been emulated elsewhere in the nation.

As proposed, the model ordinance would control the manufacture, storage and use of such potent materials as chlorine and phosgene--deadly gases that were as effective at killing troops in World War I as they are in treating water supplies or etching computer chips today.

The new regulations also cover uses not usually considered industrial, such as the ammonia used in commercial refrigeration and photo reproduction and the ethylene oxide that sterilizes hospital instruments.

Designed to allow cities and counties to enact comprehensive toxic-gas laws without inhibiting industry with a hodgepodge of inconsistent rules, the model ordinance eventually will be available for other local governments to copy in whole or in part.

“It’s a good law; a big step forward,” said Dan Heiser, a Palo Alto Fire Department hazardous-materials specialist who helped to write an earlier model law that was opposed by industry. “It assumes that if you have (a toxic gas), you can lose it--and you had better be prepared.”

Efforts to develop a model toxic-gas ordinance started in 1985, after a chemical plant disaster that killed 2,000 people at Bhopal, India. Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto) persuaded the Legislature to pay $100,000 to study the use of toxic gases by the electronics firms in his district and then write regulations that could be copied by other areas with similar industries.

Legislation Opposed

The Santa Clara County Fire Chiefs Assn. spent most of 1986 and 1987 on the complicated and controversial task, eventually producing legislation (AB 1021) that is opposed by many in industry.

This new proposal--drawn up in the last year by San Jose-area fire chiefs, the industry-oriented Santa Clara County Manufacturing Group and environmental and community activists at the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition--is an attempt to find a compromise acceptable both to environmentalists and industry.

“I think everybody is very happy with the process and the result,” Giusti said. “There was broad community involvement in getting these groups together and it worked out very well.”

Basically, drafters said, the new ordinance will elaborate on the 1988 edition of the Uniform Fire Code. That general code, on which many small and medium-sized cities base their own local safety standards, expanded its toxic-gas standards four-fold since its previous edition in 1982.

However, Santa Clara County residents, who live with large volumes of toxic gases at Silicon Valley computer-chip factories, thought the new fire code was not specific enough in some definitions and neglected non-pressurized gases and volatile liquids that evaporate into gas clouds at room temperature. For example, Heiser said the fire code does not discuss methyl isocyanate, the deadly poison responsible for the Bhopal disaster.

Strict Safety Measures

The model law categorizes gases according to their volatility and toxicity. The most dangerous gases, such as arsine, would require strict safety measures ranging from double-walled tanks and pipes to automatic shut-offs and alarms. A less deadly or less volatile gas would need less-restrictive standards.

Volumes also are taken into account. For example, a large volume of medium-dangerous Class II material could be required to adhere to more strict Class I standards.

“This document is going to work very well for 95% of the local communities who try it,” Heiser said. “The only problems could come from those companies that say, ‘Why do we need these new regs? We haven’t killed anybody yet.’ ”