After Plant Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

Five days after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled a wide swath of this town, Gov. Rick Perry tried to woo Illinois business officials by trumpeting his state’s low taxes and limited regulations. Asked about the disaster, Mr. Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.

“Through their elected officials,” he said, Texans “clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight.”

This antipathy toward regulations is shared by many residents here. Politicians and economists credit the stance with helping attract jobs and investment to Texas, which has one of the fastest-growing economies in the country, and with winning the state a year-after-year ranking as the nation’s most business friendly.

Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.

Raymond J. Snokhous, a retired lawyer in West who lost two cousins — brothers who were volunteer firefighters — in the explosion, said, “There has been nobody saying anything about more regulations.”

Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.

But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs.

As federal investigators sift through the rubble at the West Fertilizer Company plant seeking clues about the April 17 blast that killed at least 14 people and injured roughly 200 others, some here argue that Texas’ culture itself contributed to the calamity.

“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,” said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on regulation.

Since the accident, some state lawmakers began calling for increased workplace safety inspections to be paid for by businesses. Fire officials are pressing for stricter zoning rules to keep residences farther away from dangerous industrial sites. But those efforts face strong resistance.

Chuck DeVore, the vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative study group, said that the wrong response to the explosion would be for the state to hire more “battalions of government regulators who are deployed into industry and presume to know more about running the factory than the people who own the factory and work there every day.”

This antiregulatory zeal is an outgrowth of a broader Texas ideology: that government should get out of people’s lives, a deeply held belief throughout the state that touches many aspects of life here, including its gun culture, its Republican-dominated Legislature and its cowboy past and present.

Texas is one of only four states with legislatures that meet as infrequently as possible, once every two years, as required by the state’s 137-year-old Constitution. From the freewheeling days of independent oilmen known as wildcatters to the 2012 presidential race, in which President Obama lost Texas by nearly 1.3 million votes, the state’s pro-business, limited-government mantra has been a vital part of its identity.

That is particularly true in the countryside. “In rural Texas,” said Stephen T. Hendrick, the engineer for McLennan County, where the explosion occurred, “no one votes for regulations.”

Debating a Fire Code

Texas is dotted by more than 700 fertilizer depots like the one near West. Many store ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer that exploded near West, which is spread on the soil to supply the nitrogen that crops need. Consisting of white pebbles that resemble coarse table salt, the chemical can explode when heated. In the wrong hands, it can be deadly. About two tons was used in the bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Fertilizer accidents are rare across the nation. Texas was, however, the site of the deadliest industrial accident in United States history in April 1947, when nearly 600 people were killed in Texas City in an explosion on a ship carrying ammonium nitrate.

It is impossible to know whether tougher regulations would have prevented the disaster near West, especially since investigators remain unsure what sparked the fire that caused the fertilizer to explode. McLennan is among the counties without a fire code.

But federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)

“It’s tough to overstate the importance fire codes would have made,” said Scott Harris, a former emergency management coordinator in Texas for the Environmental Protection Agency, who is now with UL Workplace Health and Safety, a safety science company. “Texas just hasn’t wrapped its brain around this fact yet.”

In chemical fires, firefighters often bear a heavy toll. Ten of the at least 14 people who died in West were firefighters, and two more were residents helping fight the flames. This week, officials from the state firefighters’ association said the 50-foot-tall memorial to volunteers killed in the line of duty, on the Capitol grounds in Austin, had no room left for new names, not even those from West.

State Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, said enough was enough. “We can dance around it all we want to,” said Mr. Ellis, who has called for more frequent inspections of plants like the one near West. “But the laissez-faire attitude about government oversight and government regulation has to have some impact on safety measures.”

Gaps in Oversight

The night of the accident, Mr. Muska, 55, was not just serving as West’s mayor; he was also among the firefighters on the scene. And he became one of his town’s victims: the home where he lived with his wife and 14-year-old daughter was ruined. Five of his friends, fellow members of the West Volunteer Fire Department, were killed.

The blast, 20 minutes after a fire broke out at the fertilizer depot, was so powerful that it registered as a 2.1-magnitude earthquake, decimating the 11-building, 10-acre plant on the edge of town. It left a crater 93 feet wide and sent a gray mushroom cloud into the sky that reminded many residents of the images they had seen of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Many families in West — population 2,800 — share the bonds of Czech heritage, including Mr. Muska. The Best Western is known as the Czech Inn. Regular travelers on the interstate make a habit of stopping in West for gas and a box of kolaches at a bakery, the Czech Stop.

Like other communities in central Texas, West is home to cattle ranchers and farmers, welders and deer hunters. Its hills and wide open spaces are so green it is easy to forget that other parts of the state remain in a drought, and the roads on the outskirts of town are so tranquil it is hard to remember that Dallas is just an hour north.

The fertilizer warehouse opened in 1962 to supply local corn and cotton farmers, changing ownership and names several times over the decades. It was built far from West’s downtown, but the town expanded in recent years toward the fertilizer depot. Before long, a middle school, a nursing home and an apartment complex were just blocks away.

Residents, including Mr. Muska, never viewed the plant as a potential tinderbox capable of obliterating half their town. To many, it was a respected employer and, as some local and state leaders put it, a “good corporate citizen.” With fewer than 10 employees, the depot was owned by Donald R. Adair, 83, a lifelong resident and active member of the West Church of Christ.

“It was a friendly convenience,” said Ronnie Gerik, a farmer who bought fertilizer, fuel and tools once a week from the depot. “It meant you didn’t have to drive 20 minutes to Hillsboro or Waco to get what you needed.”

West Fertilizer fell under the purview of at least seven state or federal regulatory agencies, each with its own objectives. None had primary responsibility for ensuring the safety of the hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate stored there or that of the workers or residents nearby.

Zak Covar, the executive director of the state environmental regulatory agency, has said his office is not responsible for tracking ammonium nitrate. He pointed to the Office of the Texas State Chemist. Tim Herrman, the state chemist, said his agency monitors whether fertilizers are labeled correctly and not their safety. “It’s fair to say we are not fire-safety experts,” he said.

In Austin, two hours south of West, a handful of lawmakers say the time may be right to push, incrementally, for change.

Walter T. Price IV, a Republican state representative from Amarillo, sponsored a bill to give smaller rural counties the option to impose fire codes. Though it is a straightforward bill, Mr. Price said, he has already heard complaints from business owners that such requirements could be financially burdensome.

State Senator Brian Birdwell, a Republican whose district includes West, declined to say whether he would back the bill.

Mr. Perry, who toured the blast site and met with town leaders and emergency responders, is similarly noncommittal. Asked whether the governor would support Mr. Price’s proposal, a spokeswoman, Lucy Nashed, said that the governor would review any bill that made it to his desk, but that the investigation into the blast was continuing.

This week, Mr. Perry’s press office announced that Texas had been ranked for the ninth year in a row as the country’s most pro-business state, according to a survey by the magazine Chief Executive. Texas accounted for nearly a third of all private sector jobs created over the last decade, according to federal labor data. And under Mr. Perry, it has given businesses more tax breaks and incentives than any other state, roughly $19 billion a year.

Keith R. Phillips, senior economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, agreed that Texas’ formula helps generate jobs and draw businesses, though factors like the state’s oil economy and its low cost of living play a role, too. “Growth is going to occur where businesses can maximize profits and where workers and retirees want to live,” he said.

Paul Burka, senior executive editor at Texas Monthly, said he did not imagine that the West disaster would lead to much in the way of change. Tragedies rarely do, he said. “We’re not going to spend our money telling businesses what we should do with their premises,” said Mr. Burka, who grew up near Texas City, the site of the 1947 explosion.

Indeed, days after the accident near West, state lawmakers killed a proposal to provide $60 million in training and resources for volunteer firefighters. And a lobbyist for state firefighters, who backed Mr. Price’s effort, said the bill had little chance of passing because of resistance from the real estate industry.

“Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to,” Mr. Burka said. “That is the Texas way.”

You know... They should have a fire code... Just saying.

[Josh]

Chuck DeVore, the vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative study group, said that the wrong response to the explosion would be for the state to hire more “battalions of government regulators who are deployed into industry and presume to know more about running the factory than the people who own the factory and work there every day.”

Hahahahahah yeah fuck you Chuck

You know... They should have a fire code... Just saying.

Yes, they should. Also, contrary to Chuckles up there, no, they don't know more about running the plant. The common thread with most of these incidents is fucking abject ignorance of basic safety protocols and an absence of serious process safety management. The Texas City explosion was a prime example of this, an operation run so fucking godawful that a disaster was inevitable. They actually had a safety officer who put it in writing a few months before the blow, that they were very likely to have a fatality incident in the next year with the way things were going. That's usually the final salvo of a frustrated safety pro on the way out the door who wants to leave something on the record for when the inevitable happens.

(Safety has a pyramid method for measuring the probabilities of serious incidents based on the amount of lesser incidents, a formula that is depressingly reliable.)

Of course when they did finally have the cascade of stupidity that led to the blow, it was fifteen dead.

The CSB already has a team down in West sifting through the wreckage, and I can't wait to see their report on this. I'll bet one dollar American that the following factors will come out from this:

Negligent procedures for storage and handling of hazardous materials.
Overworked staff.
Negligent or non-existent process safety management.
Blistering incompetence from mid-to-top level management leading to blistering incompetence on the part of the crew.

People in this state are appallingly dumb about basic safety issues. I had a moron teaching a class a couple years ago (related to my current work, not safety) who used to be a derrick hand and thought he was all old-school with that shit. So he tells me how all that safety business is overdone bullshit (and I'll freely admit there's been a lot of problems with the current implementation of safety protocols in the oilfield these days. Fuck the stupid way they've implemented the FRC policy, among other things.) Then he sits there and tells me about all the gory shit he saw when he was working like it was some kind of badge of honor.

In its way it is, and fuck knows I get that whole "I worked a hard, nasty, dangerous job" mindset and all, but that's a lot of fucking orphans you moron.

What also hurts us here is that for pretty much the length of the Bush administration we were totally ignored by OSHA, to the point where OSHA was like this magical genie that happens in other states, but not here.

[Josh]

The thing that you see with these facilities is this:

Top management has no clue about safety procedures and generally no clue what's actually happening at the ground level. They don't really want to know so that they can claim ignorance and blame mid-level management when shit happens.

Mid-level management comes from either college degreed morons who've never actually worked a gig and only have a basic theoretical understanding of the processes involved, or the cutthroat assholes who punched tickets as fast as they could to the perceived comfy management gig.

On the ground level, you have guys who have procedures developed in the sixties and seventies that have never been updated, passed on by tribal knowledge in a decades-long game of telephone, often not understanding why they're doing something or what the particular importance of any given measure or protocol is, therefore not having any idea of what is important to actually do and what's just regulatory window dressing.

A couple of minor little examples off the top of my head:

Local recycling facility, does paper recycling. I actually had a buddy who sat on the jury for this one: About once a month or so, the mill that mashed up the paper would start a fire. Some metal would slip in there, staples or whatever that hadn't been removed, and the shredded paper would go up. The plant had one(!) fire extinguisher, and somebody would grab it and go put the fire out, then hang it up again. Once a month or so, the manager would take the extinguisher over to get refilled.

Naturally the inevitable happened and somebody grabbed the extinguisher to put a fire out, and... no puff. Fire spreads, everyone bails out because they had no other alternatives, building burns down.

The fucking idiot owner actually sued the company that refilled the extinguisher, claiming they hadn't done their job. Goes to jury, the labor admits that putting out fires was a routine thing, and so was refilling the extinguisher once a month. Owner does not win his lawsuit.

Second example, relating to the tribal knowledge: I had a crew doing welding work next to a process building that was contaminated with arsenic and mercury. The building was shut down (this was that fucked-up TC job I mentioned in the other thread that I will someday continue, promise!) and they were doing some external work on the ventilation systems. So for some reason rather than call me and ask for an extinguisher for their hot work, their boss told them to suit up and go get an extinguisher from the building. Now I knew that one of the extinguishers in the building was actually showing as discharged, but I hadn't been authorized to go in and pull it since the building was shut down for whatever stupid fuckup was on with that project at the moment.

(There were so many fuckups with that job that they all blur together into a massive ball of fuckup.)

Anyway, I hadn't been authorized to suit up and pull the extinguisher because you generally don't send people into haz environment without a clearer purpose, and the plan had been for the extinguisher to be deconned and pulled when other work was going on in there.

So I roll up on these guys as they're working. Where'd ya get the extinguisher, guys?

"From in the building."

Decon it?

"Oh yeah."

So I knew since there were two extinguishers in the building it was fifty-fifty that they'd gotten the good one. Take a glance, and yup, they'd grabbed the bad one. But they didn't pay attention because all they knew was 'We need a red thingy for appearance's sake when we do the job.'

So I ask 'em what they're gonna do if there's a fire.

"Run."

Had to laugh at that, at least it was an honest answer. Then I told 'em all they could do is fucking run because hey, the extinguisher they'd gotten was just a fucking paperweight. Especially if the stuff they were torching caused a fire they couldn't just smother out or stomp, which was a real possibility in the spot they were working. The Army would've absolutely loved that, I'm sure.

(Of course I then went and got them an extinguisher instead of shutting them down like a ticky-tacky little shit. I loved my crew. Undoubtedly the dumbass department head we had would've made a big production over the whole thing and generated six tons of fucking paperwork.)

...

Oh god I have to tell the other funny extinguisher story now. We had a welder that worked at the plant very, very briefly. Kind of a weird, crazy kid with a million bullshit stories that he was the hero of, generally disliked by all and sundry. At one point he was standing firewatch for another welder who was working on our stormwater tank. We had a compressor running a blower into the tank, and it was kind of a temperamental beast. So it backfires and shoots a big-ass puff of black smoke to the sky.

What does the firewatch do? He screams "It's on fire!"

Then he grabs the fire extinguisher and runs away.

Like fifty feet away and into the pump building for our emergency fire pump.

And it's like... well son, you did choose a good hiding place, but for fuck's sake not only did you not fight the fire you thought was happening, but you made damn sure nobody else could either.