IGNORANCE IS BLISS
In 1990, after the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India, Congress moved to help prevent similar accidents at facilities using extremely hazardous substances. Thousands of facilities that use certain flammable and toxic chemicals were required, under the Clean Air Act, to submit risk management plans to the Environmental Protection Agency and state and local governments. The deadline: June 21, 1999.
The core idea was that the public has a right to know about the chemical hazards in their communities, and that local emergency response personnel need advance information to prepare for and prevent possible chemical accidents. In addition, by allowing researchers to collect and compare information about accident risks at existing facilities, safety advocates could set priorities for hazard reduction and determine which companies were taking necessary precautions and which companies were needlessly endangering their neighbors.
All that prudent legislation has gone out the window with the passage of the Chemical Safety Information, Site Security and Fuels Regulatory Relief Act (S. 880). Signed into law by President Clinton in early August, the new law blocks the EPA from posting on the Internet any information about a facility's "offsite-consequence analysis" (that's bureaucrateze for information describing how dangerous a facility currently is)--including worst-case scenarios involving toxic releases or explosions. Only "qualified researchers" may request access to that information, but they are explicitly prohibited from disseminating it in any form, under pain of criminal fines. The only thing companies have to do to demonstrate that they are taking any precautionary action is hold a meeting with local stakeholders sometime in the next six months, summarizing the issues around any worst-case scenario involving a local facility.
So much for the public's right-to-know. This approach can be summarized as follows: if there is a danger of a chemical accident, the best solution is to keep the public in the dark as to how bad the risks are and what, if anything, is being done about it.
This is a classic case of how moneyed interests, focused hard on a narrow concern, can easily defeat the broader interest when the public isn't paying attention. The chemical industry led the charge for S. 880, its influence rooted in $4 million in PAC donations, soft money and large individual ($200 and up) contributions to congressional candidates in 1997-98. Its allies in the food processing industry, oil and gas producers and refiners, and agricultural fertilizer sectors--all of which are also subject to the Clean Air Act--gave another $22.5 million. Three-quarters of that went to Republicans. The leading sponsors of S. 880 were Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who raised $432,730 from those industries between 1993 and 1998, and Rep. Tom Bliley (R-VA), recipient of $93,261. Against them were a host of consumer and environmental groups, none of them major campaign contributors.
The chemical industry claims that S. 880 was needed to prevent dangerous information from falling into the hands of terrorists, giving them a road map of which plants to attack. Never mind that the EPA had specifically exempted any classified information from being released in facility risk management plans. And forget that from 1987 to 1996, there have been 600,000 accidents reported involving hazardous chemicals--and not one has been caused by terrorists. As it is, S. 880 contains no provisions to improve site security, reduce hazards through inherent safety, or harden facilities against attack.
Two-hundred-fifty people, plant-workers as well as people living nearby, die each year from chemical accidents. The more the public knows about those risks, the more the pressure that proper precautions be taken. Which is apparently the last thing the chemical industry wants.
