Trump EPA Moves To Free Chemical Plants From Rules Requiring Them To Prevent Chemical Disasters, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That An Explosion Still Had To Be Considered In Advance

WASHINGTON. The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed rolling back the bulk of a 2024 rule governing the roughly 12,000 facilities that store and process the nation's most hazardous chemicals, resolving a long-standing concern that the companies most likely to cause a chemical disaster were still expected to take steps to prevent one.

The proposal, which the agency has titled the Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention, would eliminate or weaken requirements added under the Biden-era Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention rule. Among the provisions on the chopping block are the one asking a small subset of high-hazard facilities to evaluate whether a safer chemical or process exists, the one requiring plants to assess whether they sit in the path of floods, hurricanes, or wildfires, and the one mandating backup power for the equipment that monitors and controls pollution. The agency estimated the changes would save industry between 234.7 million and 240.3 million dollars a year, a figure it presented as a benefit and did not weigh against the cost of the events the rule was written to avert.

Officials emphasized that the rollback would lift burdens without compromising safety, a balance the agency proposed to strike by removing the parts of the rule concerned with safety. "We are restoring common sense," said one official familiar with the proposal, using the agency's own term for an effort that, within days of the president's return to office, had received a letter from chemical industry trade associations requesting almost exactly the rollback now under consideration. EPA career staff had developed the 2024 rule after reviewing nearly 28,000 public comments. For the repeal, the public was granted 45 days and a single hearing.

Also slated for removal are the worker protections that critics had described as the rule's most direct safeguards, among them the authority of an employee to stop work upon identifying an imminent hazard, the ability to report a dangerous condition anonymously, and the requirement that facilities consult the workers who operate the equipment. The agency characterized these as duplicative, noting that workers retained the underlying right to notice an imminent hazard and would simply no longer have the corresponding authority to act on it.

The rule would further scale back the requirement that facilities share emergency information with the communities surrounding them, including a provision that such information be made available in the languages those communities actually speak. Nearly one-third of the affected facilities sit in areas exposed to the very natural hazards the proposal would no longer require them to evaluate, a category of risk illustrated in 2017 when the Arkema plant in Crosby, Texas, which had identified hurricanes and power loss as major threats but had not planned for either, caught fire and exploded after Hurricane Harvey knocked out its power.

At press time, the agency had clarified that nothing in the proposal prevented a chemical facility from preventing a chemical disaster on its own initiative, and that the choice, like the consequences, would now rest with the people living nearby.