West Texas and Ammonium Nitrate: Part 1

I do not want this blog to be political.  That's a difficult task to keep politics out of the conversation.  What I look at and write about is the science behind the decisions and hypothesis.  I do have some "soap box" items that move - or bias - my writing.

First and foremost, what we safety and environmental folks do needs to protect public health, especially worker health, as well as protect the environment.  Second that protection has to be real protection as well as having it based on sound data and analysis.  So if you detect bias in my writing, that is what's driving it.

I set out, since it has been a while - to write on the West Texas explosion from this angle.  What is the science behind the explosion and how can we prevent 12 emergency responders - workers - from getting killed again.  We had just lost two fire fighters in Bryan, Texas, a month ago.  Four guys go in, two get seriously burned and two die.  In West Texas, 12 die.

The way we prevent that from happening is through protocol, training and protective gear. When injury and death occurs, one of those three failed.  One of the hardest things for me to accept, and trust me I tried, is the concept that all worker accidents are preventable.

In West Texas, this was the case for those 12.  It was preventable, and that is what I want to show in these next two or three posts.  Not so much how to prevent it, but why we have the tools in place that will - and in the case of West Texas - should have prevented - or reduced - these deaths.

While doing my research for this post, I came across this:

Source

Governor Perry did not take too kindly to this political cartoon that appeared in the April 25th Sacramento Bee:

"It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon," Perry wrote in his letter to The Bee. "While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won't stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans," he added. (1)

 Jack Ohman, who drew this editorial cartoon, defends it as follows:

The Texas chemical plant had not been inspected by the state of Texas since 2006. That's seven years ago. You may have read in the news that Gov. Perry, during his business recruiting trips to California and Illinois, generally described his state as free from high taxes and burdensome regulation. One of the burdensome regulations he neglected to mention was the fact that his state hadn't really gotten around to checking out that fertilizer plant. Many Texas cities have little or no zoning, resulting in homes being permitted next to sparely inspected businesses that store explosive chemicals.

The Sacramento Bee defends Ohman:

Jack Ohman's cartoon of April 25 made a strong statement about Gov. Rick Perry's disregard for worker safety, and his attempts to market Texas as a place where industries can thrive with few regulations. It is unfortunate that Gov. Perry, and some on the blogosphere, have attempted to interpret the cartoon as being disrespectful of the victims of this tragedy. As Ohman has made clear on his blog, he has complete empathy for the victims and people living by the plant. What he finds offensive is a governor who would gamble with the lives of families by not pushing for the strongest safety regulations. Perry's letter is an attempt to distract people from that message.

Okay...let's look at this objectively.  I live in Texas.  I teach in Texas.  My students come from Texas.  My clients are little mom-and-pops to large chemical and petroleum facilities.  They come to my environmental classes, as well as our OSHA and emergency response and HAZWOPER and fire fighting and confined space classes because they do not want to hurt their employees or mess up the environment.  They want to reduce their liability and comply with the laws and regulations that are currently out there.

These are Texas businesses and Texans who do this.  If we had a culture of "free from" regulation and inspection these companies and employees would have stopped coming to our classes long ago.

Governor Perry is on his third four year term.  We still have the TCEQ (our environmental agency).  We still have the RRC (environmental agency for oil and gas), and we still have the TDSHS (our OSHA agency).  Our we in Texas as stringent as California and New Jersey?  Nope, but that's where that term "burdensome" comes in.  Just because you have strict environmental and safety regulations does not make your population and work force safer.  Case in point is California's Proposition 65 requirement whereby everything you come in contact with is "known to the state to cause cancer."  I also wrote about New Jersey's requirement to have a one in 1,000,000 cancer risk,  That, by the way, is ten times more protective than California's Prop 65.

Do a bunch of conservative Texans want OSHA and the EPA to go away.  Yes, they sure do.  But that's not how most Texans think, nor is it how Governor Perry has behaved, nor is it the reality.  Before I came to Texas I was born, lived, educated, and did the bulk of my environmental career in California.  So I understand this concept a bit better than most:

More regulation does not automatically make one safer.  Lower exposure does not automatically reduce one's health risk.

How do I feel about this cartoon and the comments made?  I'll let you fill in the caption:

Okay, so here we are getting a bit political.  Let's move away from that angle and address this particular comment from Mr. Ohman:

"So when the plant exploded and killed 14 people, people started asking the inevitable questions about whether this tragedy could have been prevented,"

That's a fair question.  Could it have been prevented?


Next post: West Texas and Ammonium Nitrate: Part 2

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