Chemical company wants to limit disclosure on plant explosion

safety board canceled a 19 March public meeting in West Virginia while it sought to resolve the dispute. It has tentatively rescheduled the hearing for 23 April while awaiting the Coast Guard’s decision, which it could appeal to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Bayer’s action also caught the attention of Representative Bart Stupak (D-Michigan) and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Stupak scheduled a 21 April hearing to review the company’s action, saying, “We are concerned about the way that Bayer may be misusing terrorism laws to suppress information related to the incident.”

Bayer believes it has a strong case for suppressing public discussion of its operations in West Virginia, said a company spokesman, Greg Coffey.

“In security matters, the site comes under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard,” Coffey said. “We have and will continue to comply with the spirit of the regulations” of the maritime act.

Bayer appears to have the support of the Coast Guard. A spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chris O’Neil, said that the service considered the entire plant, not just the dock, a “regulated facility,” and that “it might only be prudent to protect that information” Bayer does not want discussed. Bresland said the chemical board contended that the maritime act applied only to transportation of the chemicals, not the onsite storage and processes. Methyl isocyanate, a chemical used in the production of carbamate pesticides, was not directly involved in the August explosion, which the company has said was caused by human error in a unit that contained the less toxic chemical methomyl.

An above-ground storage tank that can hold up to 40,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate was just 50 feet to 75 feet from the blast area, and a much larger underground tank in a different part of the plant site can store an additional 200,000 pounds. In the Bhopal disaster, 50,000 to 90,000 pounds of the chemical leaked.

It is the onsite storage of the methyl isocyanate (or MIC) that has long concerned West Virginia environmentalists. After the Bhopal disaster, professors at West Virginia State University, which is next to the plant, and residents started People Concerned About MIC to monitor the plant.

“One of the ironies is that in the 1980s, one of the demands we had was that Carbide should act more like Bayer did in Germany and not store MIC at the plant and just make it when it needed to use it,” said Professor Gerald Beller, chairman of the department of political science at the university, who helped start the local group.

There are many other issues related to the accident that the chemical safety board wants to talk about, including the amount of overtime Bayer employees had been working before the accident; how poor communications were between the plant and outside emergency crews the night of the accident; and how one of the two men who died, Barry Withrow, had a toxic level of cyanide in his blood that no one has been able to explain.

A large part of what the board wants to talk about is the risks posed by the tanks of methyl isocyanate. If the explosion had damaged the smaller above-ground tank in particular, “the consequences of the accident might have been worse,” Bresland said.