bhopal

Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes, and super storms, chemical accidents and explosions in refineries, storage facilities, fertilizer and chemical plants are not natural disasters. They are also not rare events. We have seen their deadly and costly consequences far too often. Advances in meteorology have greatly enhanced opportunities for natural disaster preparedness. Sandy and Katrina have clearly demonstrated the power and impact of such storms on our lives, homes, and infrastructure. And the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was surely a wakeup call on the potential of hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis to compromise electrical power and greatly compound an impending disaster.

Natural events may not be preventable, but many of the consequences are. Housing can be constructed so that there is no structural collapse in the event of an earthquake. Vulnerable facilities can be hardened, located, or re-located away from populated areas, and away from fault lines, flood plains, and water ways that further heighten the risks of chemical accidents. But more fundamentally, inherently unsafe facilities and operations can be redesigned, retrofitted, and ultimately replaced by manufacturing and storage facility changes in inputs, final products, and processes that are inherently safer.

Inherent safety approaches differ from what is called secondary prevention which involves the strengthening of reaction vessels and pipes, the use of neutralizing baths, and the venting of toxic or explosive chemicals. Inherent safety approaches result in creating production and storage facilities with significantly smaller probabilities of having untoward human and commercial disasters. The European Union, but not the United States, in three successively more-demanding versions of its Seveso Directive (1982, 1996, 2012), adopted a hierarchy of prevention approaches favoring inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention for chemical accident prevention.

The Union Carbide Bhopal pesticide plant explosion in 1984 could have been wholly avoided by the construction of an inherently safer plant, which was then already used by DuPont to make the same pesticide at other locations. That notorious explosion hastened the 1990 passage of Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act. In 1996, twelve years after the Bhopal explosion, EPA promulgated its first requirement that certain high-hazard industries issue a risk management plan (RMP) to prevent chemical accidents. This was one of two chemical safety interventions contemplated by the Clean Air Act. Although professional, environmental, community, and some industry advocates urged EPA to prioritize inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention -- as had the European Union four years earlier. EPA caved in to massive industry pressure and announced it had "decided not to mandate inherently safer technology analysis" (61 Fed. Reg. 31, 69). This analysis, which would have required the identification of alternative inherently safer inputs, final products, and processes would have established the basis for the ultimate adoption of inherently safer technology.