Fatal Belle plant explosion shows federal law doesn't prevent lack of knowledge about new chemicals at facilities

May 29, 2023

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In August 1985, eight months after the leak of a highly toxic gas called methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide Corporation pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands and caused permanent disabilities or premature death for many thousands more, an accidental release of aldicarb oxime from Union Carbide's plant in Institute sent at least 135 people to the hospital.

The following year, Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, which requires industrial operators to report on the storage, use and releases of hazardous chemicals to federal, state and local governments. The law's aim is to increase the public's knowledge of chemicals at individual facilities, their uses and releases into the environment.

"The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act has strengthened awareness, communications, emergency planning and response regarding hazardous chemicals," said Lawrence Messina, a spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security.

But emergency plans are only as good as the information they’re based on, and some emergency personnel did not have information on file about a chemical that was present in the fire that burned for two hours following a fatal chemical plant explosion at Optima Chemical's facility on the Chemours Company's site in Belle last week.

C.W. Sigman, director of emergency management for Kanawha County, said a Chemours site fire brigade identified the presence of CDB-63 and methanol for other responders when they arrived after the explosion, which happened at 10:02 p.m. on Dec. 8.

CDB-63 is the product name for a chlorinated dry bleach chemical, sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate.

The chemical was not included in the annual Tier II chemical inventory data sheet that the Optima facility submitted for 2019 and has not been updated since, Messina said. The annual federal Tier II reporting period for the previous year is Jan. 1 to March 1 for hazardous chemicals that exceeded minimum reporting thresholds at facilities in the previous calendar year.

But Optima says that the day of the explosion was the first time it processed sodium dichlorocyanurate dihydrate at the Belle facility.

"At the time of the required report, sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate was not used or processed at the facility," reads a sheet of frequently asked questions about the facility and its use of the chemical leading up to last week's explosion. "In fact, it would have been inappropriate to include CDB on the Tier II report since, at the time of the report, sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate was not used at the facility."

West Virginia Emergency Management is consulting its partners at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding which provisions of the EPCRA, including reporting requirements, apply to Optima's nonreporting of CDB-63, Messina said.

Facilities that start using a new hazardous chemical or increase the quantity of a hazardous chemical that exceed reporting thresholds don't have to submit safety date sheets or a list of the chemicals until three months after they’ve triggered reporting, according to the EPA.

But being allowed to have an unreported chemical on site for any amount of time could be a concern for a town like Belle, where the population is low (1,163 per a 2019 American Community Survey estimate) but the number of different chemicals — and new chemicals introduced on a yearly basis — at the Chemours site is very high. Belle residents expressed concern about the potential danger that comes with living near the Chemours site after last week's fatal explosion.

Optima says on its website that two to three new chemicals are introduced at the facility per year on average.

But there were 15 chemicals in Optima's 2019 Tier II chemical inventory that weren't in its 2018 inventory, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of Tier II inventories submitted to the state emergency response commission by Optima's Belle facility.

Optima's Belle facility listed 18 different chemicals (nine flammable) in its Tier II report for 2019, eight more than it listed for 2017. The facility's average daily amount of methanol, which was also present in last week's fire, rose from 9,000 pounds in 2017 to 40,000 pounds in 2019. Optima's operation was still well behind Chemours’ own Belle facility in number of chemicals reported, as Chemours listed 64 different chemicals (39 flammable) for 2019.

Optima says on its website that Chemours is notified before any new chemicals are brought to the facility so that an emergency response team on the site can prepare. Optima is a Chemours tenant, and Chemours provides tenants with services including emergency response and wastewater treatment.

"As experienced in the recent incident, knowledge of the chemicals being used on site is critical for first responders when responding in an emergency," Chemours spokeswoman Robin R. Ollis-Stemple said. "Optima complied with the process that we require of our onsite tenants. Each tenant company is responsible for complying with local, state, and federal regulations and for ensuring the safe handling and processing of the chemical used in their operations."

Optima provides toll chemical manufacturing services and custom chemical manufacturing services at its Belle facility that usually consist of blending, mixing or reacting chemical raw materials to make a more refined chemical product, according to the company's website.

Optima said it was providing toll manufacturing services on chlorinated dry bleach, trying to convert sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate from 56% to 63% chlorine.

Preliminary information indicates a 1,200-gallon metal dryer became overpressurized during a chemical drying product operation, according to Optima.

The explosion killed John Gillenwater, 42, of Hurricane, a chemical operator at the plant. Optima reported that two other chemical operators were in the building at the time of the explosion, and had been hospitalized and released.

Optima could not be reached for comment beyond the information posted on its website.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said last week the CSB was sending a team to investigate the incident. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also investigating.

So is the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, and the department's Division of Water and Waste Management is awaiting results related to the water used to fight the fire, DEP Acting Communications Director Terry Fletcher said.

The majority of the water used to fight the fire, which may have picked up contaminants, was captured and fed through the wastewater treatment plant on the site that was conducting regularly scheduled sampling as the firefighting water was being fed through it, Fletcher said.

The DEP is also waiting on what Fletcher called "worst-case scenario numbers" for how much firefighting water may not have been captured by the wastewater treatment plant.

"The results we’re waiting for likely will not come back to us until after Christmas," Fletcher wrote in an email.

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