Feds move to eliminate petrochemical watchdog, putting Texans and others at risk

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The nonprofit publication Capital & Main produced this article. It is co-published with permission.

Even today, more than five years later, residents still talk about the fire. The chemical facility burned for three days, leaked toxic runoff into the waterways, forced schools and businesses to close and prompted a shelter-in-place order for everyone in Deer Park — a city just southeast of Houston in Texas’ crowded petrochemical corridor.

Eventually, after a thick layer of pollution covered the area for days, residents learned that a tank at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. had erupted in flames and that employees had been unable to contain it. Following the event, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, an independent and nonregulatory federal agency, opened an investigation, finding that a lack of proper safeguards, among other issues, was to blame.

The probe was nothing new for the agency, commonly known as the Chemical Safety Board, or for Texas. For decades, the CSB has investigated hazardous incidents, like the Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire, throughout the United States. But that could soon end. The Trump administration is proposing to defund the CSB in the 2026 federal budget and shut the agency down by the end of 2025, alarming residents living near the petrochemical plants, industry workers, public health officials and environmentalists.

The Trump administration argues that the CSB duplicates the work of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and that CSB’s small $14 million annual budget should be eliminated.

Advocates of the CSB say it is a vital independent system for gathering information, launching investigations and developing safety recommendations for the petrochemical industry. Without it, the work would fall to other agencies, industry workers or even residents — leaving a hole that the board had plugged. The potential impact in Texas, and particularly Houston, where hundreds of petrochemical plants line the coast and the city’s waterways, could be significant.

Since it first began its work in 1998, the CSB has completed investigations of 22 incidents in Texas and eight incidents in Louisiana, the second-most investigated state. There are two ongoing investigations in Texas and Louisiana as well.

But the agency has investigated industrial explosions, fires and chemical accidents across dozens of states from Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Illinois, Wisconsin and New Mexico. The CSB has investigated six incidents in California, including the 2012 fire at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond that sent 15,000 people to the hospital and a 2015 explosion at a refinery in Torrance it called a “serious near miss” that could have caused a catastrophic release of a deadly, ground-hugging cloud and brought “serious injury or death to many community members.”

“Even with (facility) process safety management and regulation in place, have things gone down? Yes. Do things still happen? Yes. And the issue is that we’re still having incidents. We’re still having people get killed, we’re still having people get injured. We’re still having plants blow up,” said Katherine Culbert, a senior process safety engineer in Houston’s petrochemical industry.

Culbert has been in the industry for over 20 years, around the same time the CSB came into existence. As a safety engineer, it’s an agency she has faith in.

“We really need to look at why and what’s going on and how we can prevent it,” she said.

Why the Chemical Safety Board?

The mission of the CSB is to find the root cause of chemical accidents, most often an issue in safety management systems, such as with the Intercontinental Terminals Company fire, but investigators look for anything that could have prevented the incident from happening.

Unlike the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the CSB does not regulate or issue fines. The agency’s mission is fully to enhance education and public safety — which for residents living near petrochemicals is critical.

Yvette Arellano grew up near the petrochemical industry in Houston and now dedicates their time to the health and safety of their community as the founder of Fenceline Watch, an environmental advocacy nonprofit.

“The Chemical Safety Board has offered us invaluable information when it comes to chemical disasters,” Arellano said. “And sharing those reports back out because oftentimes we call for a root cause analysis, but there’s no requirement (from the company) for the information to be shared with the community affected.”

The CSB creates informational videos for industry workers and residents, and posts articles cautioning communities about petrochemical risks. Most recently, the board published an article about the danger of hurricane season with regard to communities near the petrochemical industry along coastlines. Weather events have become more intense across Texas, and particularly along the Gulf Coast, because of climate change.

This is concerning to Arellano, especially with the Trump administration’s proposal to slash or even eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency next year. Without the two agencies, Arellano said the situation could be deadly for communities near the coast during hurricane season.

It’s happened before. In 2017, flood waters from Hurricane Harvey caused the Arkema chemical facility in Crosby to erupt in flames; the fire burned for five days. The CSB investigated the incident and recommended that Arkema reduce its flood risk as much as reasonably possible. Arkema complied.

Of the 1,019 recommendations CSB has published since its creation, nearly 90% have been implemented. This is another reason Culbert advocates for the agency. Since the CSB doesn’t issue fines, she said companies are more willing to engage with the board in transparency.

Companies often do not want the EPA, OSHA or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality at their sites because they could be fined, Culbert said. The CSB approaches the industry differently.

“Companies are going to implement these things because they want to save money. If the facility is operating safer, they’ll have less incidents,” Culbert said. “If I talk to anyone in my company and I mentioned the CSB, they’re like, oh, did you see that video they did on, you know, whatever. Or did you see this? Or, like, everybody uses it. It’s an amazing tool for industry, for everyone throughout the industry.”

What next?

This is not the first time the CSB has been on the chopping block. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the president proposed gutting the agency but never followed through. At that time, industry representatives expressed major concerns about potentially losing the CSB.

The investigations at the CSB could be moved to OSHA or EPA or both, but those agencies focus largely on occupational safety and the environment, said P. Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. The more holistic view from the board is lost, she said.

The Trump administration is also proposing to cut the budget of those two agencies in 2026, leaving little room for more work. OSHA is expected to lose 8% of its $632.3 million budget, while the EPA’s $9.14 billion budget would be cut by more than half.

“The investigations will probably fall on the states and local governments to be able to pick it up,” Lewis said. “We’ll have to rely on the state itself (to investigate) and respond to these incidents.”

To Lewis, this is especially concerning for Houston, which has one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities in the world. Local authorities are already overwhelmed with the threat of chemical disasters let alone having to shoulder conducting an entire investigation.

But it’s also a national problem, Lewis said. Chemical disasters can happen anywhere.

“I think that worker protections to me always rise to the top for me because regardless of whether (the workers) are in Houston, California, New Jersey or Kansas, those people are working every day to keep industry going, and they have a right to a safe environment,” Lewis said. “That is really critical. We don’t want to go backwards.”

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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