http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Refinery-fire-shows-need-for-new-rules-5169994.php
Refinery fire shows need for new rules
Rafael Moure-Eraso and Gayle McLaughlin
Published 5:36 pm, Thursday, January 23, 2014
In the wake of the 2012 Chevron refinery fire and a series of incidents at similar facilities across the country, it is clear to us that there is a refinery safety problem in America. We believe it poses a serious threat to the nation's energy supply, our economy and our security. We should no longer be satisfied with the U.S. regulatory system or even California's modified system. It is time for sweeping change.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has found recurring safety failures at refineries across the country in the past decade. In 2012 alone, 125 significant process safety accidents were tracked - 17 in California. The accidents, which involved spills, vapor releases, explosions and fires, are often a result of aging plant equipment being run to failure. Potential hazards are overlooked or undiscovered. Regulators lack the resources to conduct comprehensive inspections prior to an accident.
The safety board investigative team well documented these failures in a 100-page report presented at a public meeting in Richmond last week. Although the board passed a motion to delay consideration of this report, neither of us is willing to wait while workers are at risk of dying.
As we work to determine the best way forward, we would like to re-emphasize our commitment to the substance of the report and its recommendations.
The recommendations called on California to adopt the safety-case model that is so successful in Europe, where refineries suffer one-third the insurance accident losses of their American counterparts. We both support the safety-case model, as do many residents and stakeholders in the Bay Area. It provides a way for Richmond, the Bay Area and the state to work together - residents, workers and company representatives - to ensure refineries are operating at the safest practicable level.
The huge fire that erupted at Chevron's Richmond refinery was a result of the rupture of uninspected piping that had been corroding over many years. Its failure almost killed or injured 19 workers. It sent more than 15,000 residents to the hospital for medical attention from possible exposure to the plume of vapor and smoke released from the refinery.
The safety board report details how safety-case regulation, as opposed to the U.S. system of regulation, would have required Chevron to replace the piping with corrosion-resistant materials, thus avoiding the catastrophe. The U.S. system involves myriad standards and regulations promulgated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency and their state counterparts. It is largely static, mainly responding to accidents or complaints rather than seeking to prevent them. This system is not working to protect workers and the public.
The safety-case system - as practiced successfully in the United Kingdom, Norway and Australia, and also in the United States by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and NASA, requires companies to draw up a written "case" demonstrating how they plan to control major hazards and how they will reduce risks to "as low as reasonably practicable."
They must identify all the modern safety standards and technical practices they will use, and upon acceptance of the safety case by the regulator, companies are bound by law to do what they have promised.
This is fundamentally different from the U.S. system, which compels industrial facilities to simply conduct specified safety activities rather than setting enforceable goals for risk reduction. If regulators don't agree that the safety case has been made, they can refuse to let the refinery or chemical plant operate. In the United Sates, plants have a default right to operate even without detailing their safety measures.
California already has authorized additional technical inspectors and a plan to step up refinery inspections at Chevron's Richmond refinery. We support California's reform efforts and look forward to working with the state on implementation of the safety-case regime. If officials and members of the public join forces to effect and support this change, our communities can lead the way in assuring refinery safety and serving as a model for the nation.
Rafael Moure-Eraso is the chairperson of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. Gayle McLaughlin is the mayor of Richmond.

The Next Accident Awaits
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 29, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Next Accident Awaits.
By RAFAEL MOURE-ERASOJAN. 28, 2014
WASHINGTON — THE United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis. The horrifying chemical spill that recently contaminated the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in West Virginia is the latest in a relentless series of disasters and near-misses across the country.
It is clear to me, as chairman of the independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents, that urgent steps are required to significantly improve the safety of the nation’s chemical industry — an industry vital to our economy, yet potentially dangerous to those who live near the thousands of facilities that process or store hazardous chemicals.
Those facilities include ones like the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., where aging, corroding pipes resulted in a huge fire in August 2012, and the fertilizer plant in West, Tex., where stores of ammonium nitrate exploded last year and laid waste to a large part of the town, killing more than a dozen people.
Sifting through chemical-plant rubble from catastrophic accidents year after year, our board has long called on regulators to require — and for industry to adopt — what is known as inherently safer technology. By this, we mean using safer designs, equipment and chemicals, minimizing the amounts of hazardous chemicals stored and used, and modifying and simplifying processes to make them as safe as practicable.
While there is now, at last, a strong current within industry to adopt this safer technology as a best practice, many still oppose any actual regulatory requirements, arguing they are too costly and prescriptive. We can’t wait for corporations to volunteer, because the accidents continue, often with devastating consequences.
What we need is comprehensive regulatory reform. But achieving safety reforms is complicated and time-consuming. In the interim, the Environmental Protection Agency should step in and use its power under the Clean Air Act’s general duty clause to compel chemical facilities to take steps to make their operations inherently safer. The law assigns owners and operators of these facilities a general duty to identify hazards, design and maintain safe facilities and minimize the consequences of leaks. The E.P.A. should follow up by adopting specific regulations to meet those goals.
Twelve years ago, the E.P.A.’s administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, proposed regulations that would have encouraged producers and users of high-risk chemicals to find safer alternatives or processes.
But her proposal stalled in the face of strong opposition from American companies, which are already required to use safer technologies and other risk reduction methods at their European operations. (Insurance data indicate that losses from refinery accidents, for instance, are at least three times lower in Europe than in the United States.) In 2012, Ms. Whitman urged the agency to use the Clean Air Act to require safer technology “before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.”
The E.P.A. said recently that it was considering such an approach. The agency’s own National Environmental Justice Advisory Council has urged it to issue new rules to reduce the “danger and imminent threat” posed by chemical plants, manufacturing and transport. Across the nation, an estimated 13,000 facilities store or process chemicals in amounts hazardous enough to endanger the public, according to the E.P.A.
But that estimate understates the dimensions of the problem. For example, the West Virginia facility implicated in the recent spill, which stored chemicals used in the coal industry, would not fall under criteria used by the agency to come up with its estimate.
Consider how a requirement forcing safer practices and technologies might have prevented the three accidents I’ve mentioned.
The Chevron refinery would have been required to replace aging, corroded pipes with safer corrosion-resistant material that almost certainly would have prevented the rupture that endangered 19 workers caught in the initial vapor cloud, not to mention the smoke plume that sent 15,000 Bay Area residents to hospitals. The refinery industry accident rate overall is unacceptably high.
The agricultural chemical company in West, Tex., would have used safer storage practices and safer fertilizer blends, and kept far less ammonium nitrate on site. The lives of more than a dozen firefighters and residents might have been spared, and the widespread damage to homes, schools, a nursing home and other structures would not have occurred.
And the decades-old chemical storage tank in West Virginia that leaked as much as 10,000 gallons of chemicals used in coal processing into the nearby Elk River, contaminating the water supply of some 300,000 Charleston-area residents, would have been moved and replaced by modern, anti-leak storage tanks and safer containment.
After the West, Tex., explosion, President Obama issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to review safety rules at chemical facilities. I am strongly encouraged by the White House leadership on this issue. The E.P.A. is working with other agencies to comply. But in the meantime, the agency has the authority to act now, on its own, to require inherently safer design, equipment and processes that would go a long way toward preventing more catastrophes.
Rafael Moure-Eraso is the chairman of the United States Chemical Safety Board.