Safe Chemicals and Facilities

“The fatal and shocking incidents communities have faced in recent days demonstrate the urgent need to implement and build on existing regulatory safeguards so communities near chemical facilities are protected from chemical disasters. But, instead of protecting workers and families from death, injury, and illness, Trump’s EPA is putting communities at greater risk of harm by weakening the nation’s primary defense against chemical facility incidents. The Risk Management Program (RMP) protects against catastrophic industrial chemical releases, fires, and explosions through preventative safety measures. The Trump administration is attempting to weaken this rule. Every chemical incident, every life lost, and every evacuation is one too many. Each chemical emergency makes clear the need to strengthen, not dismantle, protections against chemical disasters before more workers, families, and communities are harmed.” 

For a year now, the Chemical Safety Board, a small independent agency that investigates chemical spills and other disasters has faced elimination under President Trump’s budget cuts.That hasn’t stopped the board from taking on the Trump administration. The agency is now opposing an attempt to roll back new chemical disaster rules that were introduced under former President Joseph R. Biden and aimed to prevent accidents at thousands of industrial facilities. The Chemical Safety Board has been taking the lead in investigating accidents, including a chemical leak at a plant in West Virginia last month that killed two people. Maya Nye, who grew up about a mile from the plant and whose family was forced to shelter in place as the emergency unfolded, described the accident as one of many over the years across the industrial corridor along the Kanawha River near Charleston, a hub for chemical manufacturing that residents call “Chemical Valley.” “We’ve been kicking and screaming for years calling for improvements, protections under these rules. And now it feels like we’re taking 10 steps back,” said Dr. Nye, who is federal policy director for Coming Clean, a nonprofit organization that advocates for policies to prevent disasters and reduce toxic pollution.

Until last year, one of the best ways to find out if you live near one of the roughly 12,000 facilities that store hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals used in manufacturing products like pesticides or medical devices was to go to an EPA webpage for the Risk Management Program (RMP). There you could type in your zip code in a search tool, and see if any of these chemical factories are nearby. (Latino, Black and low-income people are more likely to bear the brunt of chemical pollution; they disproportionately live closer to chemical plants than other groups.) But last April, the Trump administration took down this tool. Now the only way to get this information is to drive to one of several dozen EPA reading rooms across the country to examine paper records. “You have a right to know what’s in your back yard,” said Maya Nye, federal policy director for Coming Clean, a non-profit environmental health collaborative. She said the removal of the tool is particularly concerning because “we haven’t figured out how to prevent chemical disasters and people are still experiencing them”.

Climate change is making the risk of disastrous chemical accidents more likely. But the EPA wants to gut recently enhanced safety requirements for hazardous facilities. Raschelle Grandison had just walked out her front door to grab something from her car on a chilly March morning in 2019 when she stopped dead in her tracks. Grandison stared in disbelief at what looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud approaching the Houston home she shared with her mother, who ran outside to see what was wrong. They were still watching the giant black cloud hurtling toward their neighborhood from the Houston Ship Channel when the shelter-in-place alerts started blaring. A massive fire had started at a bulk-liquid storage facility run by the Intercontinental Terminals Co. about 5 miles away after a faulty pump released naphtha, a highly flammable hydrocarbon used to make gasoline and plastic, from an 80,000-barrel tank. 

Workers, lawmakers and environmental advocates gathered  this week to speak out against a proposed federal rule that would roll back protections for people who live near hazardous facilities across the country. “This is just the latest example of how this administration will do whatever it can to put industry profit over the health and safety of workers, first responders and communities that allow those companies to exist in the first place,” US Rep. Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, said during a March 25 press event on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The event was organized by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, an alliance of community, environmental, and labor organizations working to strengthen federal regulations to prevent chemical disasters.

In 2024, the federal Environmental Protection Agency attempted to address the risk of chemical leaks through a rule called the Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention. It promised a modest course correction, requiring dangerous plants to investigate past accidents, plan for climate-fueled disasters, give workers more power to halt unsafe operations, and, in some cases, switch to safer chemicals or processes. But last month, Trump’s EPA proposed gutting most of those safeguards before they ever took effect, moving to strip away requirements for safer technologies, climate and natural disaster planning, third-party safety audits, and strong worker participation in decision making. “For fenceline communities and facility workers, this rollback is a declaration that our lives are deemed acceptable sacrifices,” said Ana Parras, executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, a group that has worked in several national coalitions around chemical safety.

A new analysis and interactive map illustrates the real-world impacts of gutting regulations for the nation’s most hazardous chemical facilities, as recently proposed by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Disaster Déjà Vu outlines six Texas facilities with recent histories of back-to-back chemical incidents – including fires, explosions, and worker injuries –  that are regulated by the EPA’s Risk Management Program (RMP). New requirements for RMP facilities, intended to make communities safer from the threat of chemical disasters, were finalized under the Biden Administration and were slated to begin going into effect this year, until President Trump’s EPA proposed rollbacks.  These rollbacks are “a capitulation to industry demands, at the expense of public safety,” concludes the analysis, co-authored by Coming Clean, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA), and Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (T.e.j.a.s.).