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The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board spent three hours Thursday explaining what went wrong in August 2008, when a tank at the Bayer CropScience plant exploded and fatally injured two employees.
The CSB plans further investigation and a final report by year’s end.
It will study added documents and conduct further interviews. The investigative team also will acquire a missing Methomyl/Larvin unit security camera and MIC monitors’ data, which were brought to the team’s attention in recent days.
The investigative team’s findings preceded a community panel and harsh critiques from residents tired of problems at the plant.
Hundreds of people attended the CSB’s public meeting to hear its initial findings released earlier at a morning news conference.
An emotional Maya Nye, spokeswoman for People Concerned About MIC, explained how fear about MIC has affected her since age 16. An explosion rocked the plant and surrounding buildings 15 years ago, killing two men, she said.
As that incident unfolded, she called her father, an employee at plant owner Union Carbide. He told her to wait there until he got more information. An odor invaded her house, so she called again, but the phone lines were tied up.
“Frantically I grabbed some duct tape and started taping around the windows and taping around the doors like they taught us to do in school. Only it didn’t work, because there were too many windows and too many doors and the smell had already invaded my house,” Nye said while sobbing. “So I sat there with my dog crying and hoping that wasn’t the last phone call I was ever going to have with my father.”
She said her story is only one of thousands in the valley community.
Like that incident, she said, two workers died in the August 2008 explosion, and again notification did not go to the people immediately affected and again local residents suffered property damage.
She expressed frustration that Bayer put protecting its image ahead of getting information out to the public. A congressional investigation found Bayer public relations representatives attempted to marginalize groups including People Concerned About MIC and The Charleston Gazette after the explosion. People Concerned About MIC has existed in the Institute community since 1985.
After Nye’s testimony, CSB member William E. Wright said, “I agree with you that public relations should take a back seat to public safety.”
John Bresland, CSB chairman, told Nye the community places little trust in the efforts put forward by Bayer. Nye and community members said the plant located in a predominantly black community beside a historically black college, West Virginia State University, and residents were considered expendable because of their race.
“We did not form our community around this chemical plant,” Nye said. “It planted itself in our community.” Nye and other community members regularly point to residents with cancer who blame the valley’s chemical industry for their health problems.
She said residents shouldn’t have to sacrifice health for jobs.
Nye’s testimony concluded a community panel of experts, including Nick Crosby, vice president of operations at the Bayer CropScience Institute plant.
A handful of community members jeered Crosby openly as he answered questions from CSB panelists about the plant’s air monitoring system.
He said the plant included two permanent air-monitoring units and four portable units. In earlier testimony, CSB investigative team member Johnnie Banks said he was unaware of any portable air-monitoring units. Further testimony was heard from State Fire Marshal Sterling Lewis; Kanawha County Director of Emergency Services Dale Petry; Michael Flynn, director of occupational safety and health and apprenticeship for the International Association of Machinists, the plant’s union; and Dennis Hendershot, a chemical process safety expert.
Flynn said there are lessons to be learned about fatigued employees working long hours. He said the economy may be a driving factor for some companies and employees, although safety is obviously a major issue.
“It’s cheaper to pay somebody for 12 hours than it is to hire an additional half body. A lot of times the economy drives that,” Flynn said.
Hendershot emphasized safety culture as a priority.
“You don’t need to fix what’s working right, you need to fix what’s broken,” he said. “But if you don’t find out what’s broken … then you’re not going to be able to fix it.”
Further investigation will include possible changes that could be made to Bayer’s storage of MIC. Bayer is the only U.S. facility with MIC inventory exceeding a threshold quantity of 10,000 pounds that requires a risk management plan.
An underground tank near the main facility contains 200,000 pounds of MIC and an MIC day tank is located about 80 feet from the August 2008 explosion site.
A DuPont plant in Texas stores very little MIC but uses it to make numerous products. That plant used to ship railcars full of MIC from the Northeast to Texas in the mid 1980s.
“They now make and consume MIC in a very small section of the piping system. There’s only a few pounds available at any given time,” said John Vorderbrueggen, the CSB’s investigation supervisor in the Bayer explosion.
“In fact, Dupont patented this process and received an award in 1987, so we will be looking at this technology and we will be considering that as it could be applied at the Bayer Cropscience facility.”
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