Last week’s announcement by the U.S. Coast Guard made it sound like things were all hunky dory between the CG and the federal Chemical Safety Board.

Coast Guard officials, you will recall, approved the board’s plans to release a preliminary report on the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two workers at Bayer CropScience’s plant in Institute.

When I blogged about the deal, reported by The Associated Press, I headlined the Sustained Outrage entry, “A win for the public’s right to know.”

Alas … It appears I blogged too soon, at least according to the Coast Guard’s letter to the Chemical Safety Board on this issue. I’ve posted the letter here, so read for yourself.

It appears that there is at least one piece of information that Coast Guard officials successfully blocked the board’s investigators from releasing to the public, citing plant security and secrecy provisions of the Maritime Transportation Security Act.

That piece of information? According to the letter, it involved “a description of the time of day a chemical was transferred.” OK, maybe publishing the time when Bayer transfers a particular chemical — maybe deadly methyl isocyanate gas, or MIC — is considered an invitation to terrorists. But what about plant neighbors? If the transfer of chemicals is considered especially dangerous, residents might want to use the time of these transfers to stay inside, or even make a trip to the mall, a little farther from the danger zone.

Under the Coast Guard’s rules, they won’t have that choice. And the board went along with this, deciding, according to the letter that withholding that information “did not materially impact any of the points CSB intended to make.”
Initially, Coast Guard officials raised a second concern: The board’s plan to discuss “construction standards” for a blast shield on an MIC tank located near the explosion site.  The Coast Guard backed off on this, after learning that the “planned discussion of the blast shield during the presentation did not reveal anything” the CG would consider “security sensitive information.”

But there’s also a larger issue here, hinted at in the Coast Guard’s letter to the Board.

S.N. Gilreath, acting director of the Coast Guard’s Office of Maritime and International Law, noted that his agency wants to establish a “memorandum of understanding” that would “formalize this process” of the Coast Guard getting to edit and censor CSB investigation reports.

One has to wonder what impact this will have on the Chemical Safety Board’s ability to do its job. We already know (see this post)  that the board only investigates a fraction of the accidents across the country that meet its triggering definition.

And what chemical or oil company wouldn’t want to cite the Coast Guard’s secrecy rules to delay or otherwise hamper a board investigation at its facility?

The board has recently shown a little more gumption in standing up to this secrecy, with Chairman John Bresland telling The New York Times:

I don’t like the idea that if we went to a meeting in West Virginia and someone asked a question, we’d have to say, ‘Sorry, we can’t talk about it’. We don’t think any other agency should have the right to tell us what we can put in our reports.

But the board is a small agency with only 37 employees that manages about 10 investigations at any one time. What if every report, ever Power Point, every safety video, every press release — everything — had to go through the Coast Guard first?

Could the board afford to fight this secrecy on each and every investigation it does? How much would this process thwart the board’s work?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Chemical industry, Environment, Open government, Worker safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.