But a number of chemical experts decried the regulations, which came as part of a larger homeland security bill, calling them “empty” and saying they were the product of an intense chemical-industry lobbying effort to neuter tougher rules. Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who formerly served as adviser to the U.S. Commission on National Security, spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Lee Hudson Teslik about the North Carolina blaze, Congress’s recent legislation, and the threats to American chemical plants that remain unaddressed. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What do you make of the accident Thursday night? A few dozen civilians were treated for breathing injuries, but there were no deaths. Should the evacuation efforts be considered a success?
Stephen Flynn: Well this is a small community in a rural area where you can evacuate people in a reasonable fashion before this cloud of stuff could cause real harm. In the scheme of things, it would be helpful if some of the more deadly chemicals weren’t made in some of the most densely populated parts of our country, a la New Jersey. It would also be helpful if, where these plants are, the people who may have to respond to these events are equipped to respond to them. This is not likely to be the case in smaller communities.
How surprising was it to you that there would be a major fire at a chemical plant?
Overall, it’s amazing that we’ve had so few of these incidences, given that we’re dealing with the most deadly substances known to man, and we make such huge volumes of them, and we ship them around all over the country. The probabilities have got to be that we would face more accidents, just by the nature of what we’re dealing with here, and the complexities of the systems that are used to manufacture and distribute these substances. But there are accidents. We did have a series of them throughout the ’90s.
Congress just passed legislation intended to shore up plant security. Do you think it will make much of a difference?
I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference. It could certainly affect a few of the highest-risk plants, where now DHS has some authority to go check the security, and shut down the plant if needed. What this will allow is something I think all Americans would take for granted that it’s already been done post 9/11. This is that somebody has done a vulnerability study, that they have a plan in place where there’s been some government oversight of this process.
Are chemical plants going to comply?
To the extent that everybody in the industry knew that nobody was looking over their shoulder, it made it very difficult to invest in security, because security has costs that put you at a competitive disadvantage. Even if you are somebody who wants to do the right thing, if you know your neighbors to the right and left are not doing the right thing, because they’ve made the financial choice to live by the edge, then they’re able to sell the product cheaper. So you haven’t addressed the systemic vulnerability to the sector, because the bad guys will gravitate to the weakest point. It’s been difficult to date to find any financial case for any serious reforms to be made in chemical security. This gets us one step closer to having that. But what really is the open issue with the new legislation is DHS’s capacity to actually assess plans as being viable, and whether it will actually use the enforcement, whether this has any teeth. If there are no appropriations to give the departments the capacity to enforce these rules, then it will have a negligible impact.
One of the chemicals involved in the fire Thursday was chloride gas. Could some of the more dangerous chemicals—like chloride and hydrogen fluoride—be replaced by safer chemicals, like bleach or ozone gas?
Well it is feasible to do it. But there’s no question that there are market issues here. The industry is under pressure and the profit margins are not huge. So not surprisingly, particularly for some of the older plants, retooling would be expensive. This could make the economic analysis that it’s cheaper to shut down, rather than take the time it would require to recover the costs of retooling. You could put your money somewhere else and get a better return.
Given the economics, then, how do we make communities safer?
What was in play for a while, which I thought was a smart regulation, but didn’t survive the day, is one that said: Okay, let’s help you with the economics here. If you decide you want to have a plant in an extremely densely populated area, and you want to deal with some of the most deadly chemicals known to man, then you have to have much higher end safeguards, and the costs associated with that, to continue doing that business. Now if you move the chemicals to somewhere else, somewhere more remote, and you deal with those substances in smaller quantities, then we will require less in the way of safeguards, because there will be less consequence [of a spill], and it will be a less attractive target. So you do a tiered system. You create an incentive for companies to make a market case where it makes sense for them to move to a more remote area, to avoid costs. The problem when you make it voluntary is that if one company makes the transition and others don’t, it won’t survive. Can the industry afford to do it? Absolutely. But this would take a much more active federal role.
One criticism of the bill is that it didn’t address transportation. It made requirements about safety procedures within chemical plants, but didn’t address the issue of the trains or trucks that still carry the chemicals to and from the plants, often through densely populated areas.
From a safety standpoint, it remains that the highest risk in chemicals is in transport. Not surprisingly, if you’re working in a facility in a controlled environment, you can pretty well manage safety. It’s much more difficult, comparatively, with transport, where you’re operating in areas around where people live and work. From a security standpoint, this is a much easier target. You wouldn’t get as much of an impact as hitting a plant, but this is low-hanging fruit. The bottom line is, if you’re going to have a comprehensive chemical security bill, and you don’t address the transportation of chemicals, you don’t have a comprehensive bill.
