CHEMICAL HAZARDSFeds Move to Eliminate Petrochemical Watchdog, Putting Texans and Others at Risk
Amid increasingly intense weather, the Chemical Safety Board is the lone independent agency watching over the Gulf Coast’s petrochemical corridor.
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.
