http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/national/30CHEM.html
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a review of 167 industrial accidents since 1980 in which chemical reactions
caused deaths, injuries or serious damage, federal safety experts have found
that more than half involved substances that are not regulated by worker safety
and environmental agencies.
The experts, from the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, also found that there is no single repository of information on runaway chemical reactions, making it difficult for industries and government agencies to identify patterns that might promote safer handling.
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Without improvements in rules and practices, it will be hard to avoid more accidents and "adequately understand root causes and lessons learned" when one does occur, according to the report, which is to be released today.
The safety board also concluded that a 10-year-old list of highly reactive chemicals that require careful handling has "significant gaps." One important weakness, the board said, is that the list, compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, considers only the danger of individual compounds — even though many accidents happen when relatively benign chemicals are mixed in dangerous ways.
"We think that there are some big holes in the current system of reactive chemicals management right now," said Dr. Gerald V. Poje, a member of the chemical safety board.
The group's report is scheduled to be released and discussed today at a public hearing at the City Hall in Paterson, N.J. Paterson was the scene of a 1998 chemical accident that injured nine workers. An explosion and fire at a plant in nearby Lodi killed five workers in 1995.
Last December, OSHA, which is responsible for preventing such accidents, withdrew the chemical safety program from a list of regulations it was planning to modify. Revising the program had been listed as a priority by the agency after six labor unions petitioned for changes in the wake of the Lodi explosion.
Critics of the agency, including unions and the Center for Public Integrity, a private watchdog group, said the new safety report bolstered their call for changes to regulations.
"The problem isn't chemicals, it's chemists and cost-cutting managers who care nothing for workers and the communities in which they operate," said Eric Frumin, the safety and health director for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, whose members include 20,000 workers in chemical industries. Mr. Frumin said it was vital for the government to "impose a standard of management practices on an industry."
Several representatives of the chemical industry agreed with some of the safety board findings, but said simply adding more chemicals to government lists was not a solution.
"The reactivity of materials with one another is the very foundation of the science of chemistry," said a statement issued yesterday by the American Chemistry Council, a trade group. It said that a better approach was to focus on training, so that workers and managers are more aware of the risks of combining chemicals or exposing them to heat, cold, pressure and other conditions.
In explaining the decision to drop the issue from the agency's list of programs up for changes, officials there said that other issues were simply more pressing at the moment and that lobbying had nothing to do with it.
In a letter to the chemical safety board on May 21, John L. Henshaw, the chief of OSHA, said, "The issue of reactive chemical safety continues to be of vital interest to the agency."
The four-year-old chemical safety board is an independent agency, modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board. It investigates chemical accidents and makes recommendations to OSHA and to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for preventing widespread toxic releases.
Pressure to change the safety agency's rules that govern reactive chemicals intensified after the Lodi explosion, which involved sodium hydrosulfite and powdered aluminum, neither of which is on the agency's list of potential reactive hazards. It is just one of the dozens of case studies in the new report, which involved a total of 108 deaths.
In an interview, Dr. Poje cited the explosion on April 25 on West 19th Street in Manhattan that caused dozens of serious injuries as an example of the harm that could be caused by uncontrolled chemical reactions. Preliminary investigations by the board there, he said, point to improper storage and handling of chemicals at a sign and printing company.
Just as few people are aware of the potential dangers of blending common substances like ammonia and bleach (which can produce chlorine gas), ignorance in an industrial setting can have deadly consequences. "When you move from smaller matters under the kitchen sink into larger amounts," Dr. Poje said, "you can have monumental explosions that will shatter people's lives and include the public out on the street."
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