Years of Warnings

In the 1980s, a series of high-profile chemical accidents — including a toxic cloud that leaked from a West Virginia petrochemical plant and sent hundreds to the hospital in 1985 — fueled mounting public pressure over the need to prevent dangerous chemical accidents. In 1990, lawmakers passed new amendments to the Clean Air Act, a landmark 1970 environmental law, aimed at assuaging these concerns.

Among the newly strengthened law’s requirements was a mandate that facilities handling potentially dangerous toxins draft a risk management plan to be shared with regulators, detailing how they intended to prevent chemical accidents and contain them if accidents occurred.

This is the origin story of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Risk Management Program, which oversees companies working with volatile, dangerous chemicals and tries to ensure that they are mitigating risks, both for their workers and for the communities that surround them.

But for years, environmental advocates have warned that the scope of the EPA’s oversight is too narrow, excluding a class of potentially dangerous chemicals called “reactive hazards” that on their own may be considered safe but can combine with other substances to cause catastrophic accidents. The result has left companies like BioLab that process such reactive hazards in a yawning regulatory loophole.

For more than two decades, the disaster investigators at the Chemical Safety Board have been urging the EPA to close this loophole. The Board argued as far back as September 2003 that the Risk Management Program doesn’t cover many dangerous reactive chemicals that environmentalists believe should be subject to additional oversight. Yet since then, little progress has been made.

“Although EPA has a duty to review the list of [Risk Management Program] substances every five years, it has not reviewed the list since at least 2000,” wrote Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. In fact, Kron said, in twenty years, the agency has “never added a new substance to the list.”

The EPA did not reply to  inquiries about its Risk Management Program.

Expanding the list of chemicals to bring more facilities under federal oversight has become a priority for environmentalists, explained Maya Nye, the federal policy director at Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit focused on chemical industry oversight.

Being subject to Risk Management Program requirements, Nye said, “would have required [BioLab] to think about, ‘What is the emergency response plan? What may lead to a chemical disaster?’”

Instead, the EPA’s oversight of the chemical industry has been subject to constantly changing political winds in Washington and intense pressure from the moneyed chemical industry — all while chemical accidents have occurred again and again at BioLab’s plants and similar facilities.

“Fighting Against Industry Pressure”

Under the Barack Obama administration, the EPA strengthened its oversight of chemical facilities and accidents, and in 2014, the agency proposed expanding the list of chemicals covered under the Risk Management Program’s authority. But that reform remained a proposal — and when former president Donald Trump came into office, the program’s chemical accident prevention rules were gutted.

Now, under the Joe Biden administration, the Risk Management Program’s oversight abilities have been largely restored, with some tweaks. And in March, the EPA finalized stricter chemical-disaster-prevention rules that, among other things, require chemical facilities covered by the program to consider risks posed by climate change and extreme weather.

Throughout this period, the chemical industry has fought to limit the program’s oversight. The industry’s biggest lobbying arm, the American Chemistry Council, led the charge to prevent any new chemicals from being added to the list in 2014 — and last year spent more than $15 million lobbying on the EPA’s chemical oversight rules and other matters in Washington.

The council is now among several lobbying groups that launched an administrative challenge of EPA’s recently strengthened chemical plant rules, potentially laying the groundwork for a later legal battle.

The same trade group has also been lobbying on new safety rules for rail cars carrying hazardous materials, pushing to weaken a bill that was intended to bolster safety rules after a catastrophic train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio, last year. That bill has since stalled.

“We have been fighting against industry pressure for many years,” said Minovi, the analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

As a result, facilities processing many so-called reactive hazards remain unregulated.

In the Chemical Safety Board’s report on the 2020 BioLab disaster in Louisiana, the agency once again pointed out this “critical coverage gap,” which it said “contributed to [the 2020] incident, and . . . contributed to many other reactive chemical incidents over the past three decades.”

There are signs this lack of oversight may have contributed to Sunday’s incident in Georgia as well.

On early Sunday morning, when a fire set off a sprinkler system inside BioLab’s Georgia facility, the water interacted with a “water-reactive chemical,” according to local fire officials, sending a chemical plume into the skies above Conyers. This plume contained chlorine gas, EPA investigators found, which can cause long-term health complications at high levels of exposure.

As the Chemical Safety Board emphasized in a statement shortly after Sunday’s catastrophe, the BioLab plant in Georgia — like the BioLab plant in Louisiana — processes a chemical called trichloroisocyanuric acid, often abbreviated as TCCA, to manufacture spa and pool treatment chemicals. When a large quantity of TCCA comes into contact with a small amount of water, it can undergo a violent chemical reaction and produce deadly chlorine gas.

Chlorine, which in high concentrations can cause respiratory problems and potentially lung disease, is covered under the EPA’s Risk Management Program. Facilities processing large quantities of chlorine therefore must provide detailed risk management plans to federal regulators about their operations.

But as the Board wrote in its investigation of BioLab last year, TCCA is not regulated under the Risk Management program, nor by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which also maintains standards for processing hazardous chemicals in industrial facilities, even though the chemical produces chlorine when activated.

This leaves BioLab’s facilities largely unregulated — even after Sunday’s disaster and those that preceded it.

“Just a Matter of When”

BioLab has been operating in Conyers, Georgia, since 1973. As the company has built out its operations in the area (and collected tax breaks from county officials, as the American Prospect reported this week), numerous chemical fires have shaken the local community.

Conyers, like many communities that are in proximity to facilities that process dangerous chemicals, is majority black. Residents in the town have lower incomes, on average, compared to other areas of Georgia, and lower property values.

In 2004, a plume of gas from a chemical fire engulfed Conyers and, like this week’s accident, forced hundreds of residents to evacuate — resulting in health harms that residents say lingered for years. After years of litigation, residents and workers won a $7 million settlement from BioLab in 2010 over the incident.

“We know that when there are multiple incidents at a facility, it’s more likely that another incident is going to occur,” said Nye of Coming Clean. “It’s a sign that there will be another one. It’s just a matter of when.”

Chemical accidents in 2016 and 2020 followed the 2004 fire, sending toxic smoke into the air, shaking the local community, and renewing calls for accountability for the facility.

For Shi Jenks, another Conyers resident, Sunday’s incident marked the second time she had to evacuate as a result of a BioLab accident. This time, Jenks has a two-year-old son and worries for his safety, she told us.

“We’re supposed to learn from history,” Jenks said, “And I think Rockdale [County] is failing us on that part.”

In the years after the 2004 accident, BioLab was shuffled between private equity firms.

In 2013, in the wake of the bankruptcy of its former parent company, Chemtura, BioLab was acquired by a private company called KIK Consumer Products that was at the time backed by private equity firm CI Capital Partners. Two years later, KIK was acquired by Centerbridge Partners, a global private equity firm. Centerbridge’s shareholders have since extracted millions from the company, all while chemical disasters continue for residents of Conyers.

“It can be devastating for people to live near facilities that are day in, day out, using, storing, manufacturing highly hazardous chemicals,” said Minovi. “The human impact cannot be overstated.”

These chemical accidents, Minovi said, can be spurred and compounded by extreme weather events — a worrying phenomenon that environmentalists call “double disasters.” This was the case at the BioPlant fire in Louisiana in 2020: winds from Hurricane Laura damaged the chemical facility, allowing rainwater to enter and setting off the violent chemical reaction.

This week’s disaster in Conyers took place in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which caused devastation across the Southeast, including flash flooding in the region where the BioLab facility is located. It’s unclear if the hurricane contributed to the accident — local fire officials said the matter has not yet been determined — but the storm did limit the resources of emergency responders as they worked to put out the chemical fire.

Environmentalists fought hard to strengthen the EPA’s Risk Management Program to account for the impacts of extreme weather on chemical accidents. Thanks to the regulations finalized this year, facilities covered by the program will be required to consider and map out the potential hazards posed by climate change.

But BioLab’s facilities, which fall outside of the program, will not.