Five years ago tonight a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer company in West, Texas. Emergency responders rushed toward the facility which contained 40 to 60 tons of fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate, but twenty minutes later a massive explosion ripped through the building killing 12 responders and three others,\u00a0injuring 252 and damaging or destroying 500 buildings. A 22-unit apartment complex and a 145-bed nursing home across the street were destroyed.\u00a0Two of the victims who died lived at the apartment complex and another lived at the nursing home.<\/p>\n
Much of the town has been rebuilt, but the emotional scars remain<\/a>:<\/p>\n The disaster displaced hundreds of people and left many others injured or bereaved, and its emotional toll continues. In the first couple of years after the explosion, five suicides were connected to the aftermath of the incident, said Jim Ellor, a Baylor University social work professor who has volunteered to provide counseling in West over the last five years. He said long-term stress has continued around the community. \u201cThere is always a sense of, if I live in West and there\u2019s a fire, I won\u2019t go to my picture window to watch it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt hits so deeply, the new normal is to still have some scars from it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What are some of the lessons learned — and not learned from the explosion?<\/p>\n 1. Don’t Let a Good Catastrophe Go to Waste:<\/strong> It sounds cynical, but the fact is that all-too-often, progress is made in this country only as the result of a disaster that brings to the surface policy failures that should have been corrected long before. The West explosion, along with several other smaller chemical plant incidents in the months before, led President Obama to issue Executive Order 13650<\/a>, “Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security”\u00a0 which called for\u00a0additional measures to be taken by government agencies\u00a0 to further improve chemical facility safety and security. Among the specifics that came out of the Executive Order were efforts by OSHA, EPA and the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate their efforts and to modernize regulations that protect workers and the public from explosions and uncontrolled releases.<\/p>\n 2. Corollary — Protections Delayed are Protections Denied: <\/strong>This is actually a corollary to lesson 1 above.\u00a0EPA and OSHA immediately set out to improve their protective regulations. EPA’s modernized Risk Management Program<\/a> rule was issued in the waning days of the Obama administration and has met the anti-regulatory meat cleaver of Scott Pruitt (see below). OSHA, whose regulatory process is much slower than EPA’s was hard at work on modernizing its Process Safety Management Standard<\/a>\u00a0(PSM), although it has been Missing in Action since the start of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Executive Order also called on OSHA to fix its flawed PSM “retail exemption.” After the West Fertilizer explosion, OSHA discovered that the facility was not covered by OSHA\u2019s Process Safety Management and had therefore not been inspected since the mid-1980s. The reason was the little known \u201cretail exemption\u201d that categorized the fertilizer facility as a retail establishment, exempted from the PSM standard, despite the thousands of pounds of ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia it contained. OSHA set out to fix the flawed definition of a retail establishment, but the Agricultural Retailers Association<\/a>\u00a0successfully lobbied Congress to stop OSHA from regulating such establishments, and the Court later said that OSHA had to go through full rulemaking to make the change.<\/p>\n The problem was that it had taken OSHA over two years to make the change to the retail exemption, by which time the impact of the West disaster had largely faded from memory, along with the urgency to make the necessary changes to ensure that flawed policies like the retail exemption didn’t lead to similar future catastrophes.<\/p>\n