Police block the road Monday, Feb. 8, 2010 to the Kleen Energy Systems power plant damaged by Sunday’s explosion that killed at least five workers and injured a dozen or more in Middletown, Conn. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Investigators from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board are said to be close to reaching a deal that would allow them to do their job of looking into what caused last Sunday’s terrible explosion that killed 5 workers at the Kleen Energy Systems power plant construction site.

But CSB’s investigation was stalled for nearly a week by state and local turf battles, and it’s not clear how much that will hamper their efforts to find root causes and recommend ways to avoid similar disasters in the future.

What’s more, this is far from the first time that the CSB has run into trouble even getting access to an accident site to get started on its investigation.  The same thing happened in November 2006, when the CSB deployed to an explosion at the CAI/Arnel ink and paint manufacturing facility in Danvers, Mass.

One local official at Danvers went so far as to hold a press conference where he stated that the CSB was “uninvited,” “unwelcome,” “not a piece of the pie,” and “a distraction that has taken time away from the real investigators.”

And, between 1999 and 2005, the CSB ran into similar problems during at least seven investigations, according to this letter from the board to members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Among the incidents:

– In 2001, an Indiana steel mill where a fatal hydrocarbon fire had occurred denied CSB investigators permission to enter the site until after the company had cleaned up the physical evidence from the accident.

– In 2002, a Mississippi chemical company that had a powerful reactive chemical explosion challenged CSB investigators’ authority to enter the premises by claiming that all hazardous materials had been consumed in the ensuring fire and that the CSB had therefore no jurisdiction under the Clean Air Act. 

– In 2003, a Kentucky automotive products company that experienced a fatal dust explosion removed CSB investigators from the accident site and challenged the agency’s jurisdiction by questioning whether the massive fire had actually released hazardous air pollutants.

– In 2005, during the CSB investigation of the Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers (See photo above), the company disputed whether the CSB was authorized to look at root causes above the level of an individual facility, such as a lack of safety oversight by corporate officials and directors.

And, of course here in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, Bayer CropScience did its best to keep the CSB from doing a complete investigation of the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two Institute plant workers.

Now, the Clean Air Act spells out the CSB’s authority to get onto plant sites to do investigations:

… Upon presenting appropriate credentials and a written notice of inspection authority, enter any property where an accidental release causing a fatality, serious injury or substantial property damage has occurred and do all things therein necessary for a proper investigation … and inspect at reasonable times records, files, papers, processes, controls, and facilities and take such samples as are relevant to such investigation.

And, the law requires that the board:

… Investigate (or cause to be investigated), determine and report to the public in writing the facts, conditions, and circumstances and the cause or probable cause of any accidental release resulting in a fatality, serious injury or substantial property damages … 

But obviously, there is a pattern of the CSB running into problems just trying to get access to accident sites and to documents and persons it needs to interview to do its job.

West Virginia’s two U.S. senators were very concerned about the board’s probe of Bayer and more recently of DuPont’s Belle plant … but when I asked about the trouble the CSB had getting access to the Connecticut explosion site, I didn’t get a rise out of either of them. Sen. Robert C. Byrd declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller would say only that Rockefeller was monitoring the situation.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., did write a letter to the ATF, complaining about its involvement in blocking CSB access to the Kleen Energy plant. And in Washington, the House Committee on Education and Labor may consider whether the best rules are in place to help the CSB do its job, according to this story from Connecticut Public Broadcasting. Committee member Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said:

I mean we’re all on the same team here and we want to do what’s right for the victms, the community and obviously for the industry as a whole.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Chemical industry, 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.