Emergency Response Will Never Be Adequate for a Serious Release
Fred Millar is a specialist and policy consultant in the areas of homeland security, hazardous materials transportation, and chemical accident prevention. He’s worked on and researched chemical safety regulation and prevention of chemical hazards, and he’s advised members of the United States Senate and Senate staff regarding proposed chemical accident prevention laws. Millar was a Toxics Director for the non-profit environmental organization, Friends of the Earth, and prior to this he served as Director of the Nuclear and Hazardous Materials Transportation Project at the Environmental Policy Institute. Millar was an independent consultant on nuclear waste and chemical accident prevention policies and served on the District of Columbia Local Emergency Planning Committee.
Millar testified before the Washington D.C. Council on the risks of terrorist attacks involving hazardous chemicals, and he was invited to give presentations on these risks for the Transportation Security Administration; U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Fairfax, VA and Montgomery County, MD Local Emergency Planning Committees; and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Emergency Response Planners Committee.
In reference to emergency response and preparedness, Millar states, “It is an understandable reaction to [the] East Palestine [train derailment] to try to beef up local emergency response planning - but a waste of time. As the emergency response community itself knows, local responders, even with help from mutual aid units, will never be adequate for a serious hazmat release from a chemical facility or from hazmat cargo in transport. As the well-respected federal Emergency Response Guidebook, ‘The Orange Book’, often advises, and as East Palestine residents learned firsthand, immediate evacuation(s) would often be needed.”
He explains…
After the Bhopal 1984 disaster killing an estimated 8,000 people in India, a worried U.S. Congress enacted within the overall Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA) a novel national mandate on chemical facilities. Knowing politically, they could not pass strict operation mandates to mitigate even the gravest disaster risks of the U.S. chemical industry, Congress sought to at least get information into public hands of those most at risk. These hopeful new mandates of SARA are known as Title III: The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). This legislation ensures the public’s right to obtain information concerning toxic releases from local high-risk facilities. At the railroad and trucking industries’ insistence, however, hazmat transportation by rail and truck were exempted. The U.S. Steelworkers’ union led a successful push on a parallel Worker Right-to-Know law that was enacted during the same Congress.
Because Congressional legislators had little faith that local officials such as Fire Chiefs and often hapless emergency management agencies would act strongly to educate the public about chemical risks, they created a new and unique national emergency response institution consisting of 4,100 Local Emergency Planning Committees (LEPCs).
Congress intended the new LEPCs, each consisting of representatives from specified local sectors, to inform communities vividly about potential disastrously high consequences - pointedly, not including often low probabilities - of toxic gas releases, fires, and explosions from nearby facilities. The U.S. EPA provided excellent guidance documents for the LEPCs and 12,500 chemical facilities.
Receiving no funding and staffed nearly exclusively by volunteers, this noble experiment very soon proved to be a national failure in their communication with local communities. Those who volunteered at LEPCs were dominated, primarily, by paid representatives of local industry who were often the largest employers and property taxpayers. The national LEPC mantra in effect was a quasi-secret agreement murmured among these leading volunteers and citizens, “Let us not alarm the public.”
EPCRA’s initial environmental supporters, many of whom eagerly joined one or more of the 4,100 LEPCs created, soon found them to be little more than a sad joke, a pretense of community oversight that was even counterproductive to their intended Congressional purpose. Strict new national chemical security laws soon choked any real flow of information to the public. Although federal agencies showed local officials how to get some generalized risk information to the public, few did.
Initial supporters quickly returned to Congress and the U.S. EPA seeking new legislation and regulations, and Congress promptly enacted a second Community Right-to-Know law, Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. This legislation transferred a key responsibility from the ineffectual LEPCs over to local chemical facilities.
Chemical companies were now mandated to calculate their own Worst Case Scenario releases of their most dangerous toxic gas, fire, and explosive chemicals, often revealing previously secret and alarming high release consequence potentials. Congress and the U.S. EPA ignored the industry’s pleas to require reporting only on smaller potential releases and to let facilities also report calculations on low probabilities of Worst-Case Scenario consequences. Americans’ Right-to-Know, therefore, means the public has a Right-to-Know worst case ‘What If?’ potentials.
Nationally, nearly 12,500 chemical companies are required to report Worst Case Scenario information to their respective LEPCs, but Congress still expects the significantly underfunded, volunteer-staffed LEPCs to make information identifying the highest facility risks vividly available to their communities - which LEPCs have nearly universally and steadfastly refused to do. Many have just given up meeting altogether.
One LEPC in Cleveland, Millar acknowledges, led by a persuasive environmentalist did succeed in gathering community members together for a single, well attended public meeting to hear an announcement addressing potential consequences of a local facility and to review release potential consequence maps. A business-friendly U.S. EPA capitalized on this case, touting it as indicative of many other potential success stories - if only this were true.
Given that critically underfunded LEPCs were never given strong enough mandates and were widely co-opted by local industry, Millar suggests that, currently, the most important post-East Palestine risk-reduction actions from concerned citizens should not focus on emergency response planning, but instead should pressure local and state officials to push risk-imposing railroads to:
Provide vivid Worst Case Scenario consequence hazmat information directly to communities during annual public meetings. Ohio officials are now demanding hazmat train risk information in reaction to the East Palestine fire event.
Millar identifies key points:
What if? What consequences could occur in a densely populated community given much more dangerous cargoes and toxic releases from many more railcars? (Consider, for example, the 2013 Lac-Mégantic, Quebec crude oil train disaster in Canada causing 47 deaths, which could easily have been much worse.)Demand hard evidence identifying the extent to which railroads reduce disaster risks through protective urban hazmat re-routing, especially around the many High Threat Urban Areas where this is possible. Railroads already use existing inter-railroad ‘interchange’ agreements extensively when they find them mutually commercially beneficial.
Railroad corporations, of course, always strongly oppose any significant government mandates to beef up safety. This was recently evident in the Trump Administration’s elimination of Obama-era regulations that were imposed in stealth without railroad concurrence, requiring railroads to install much safer Electronically Controlled Pneumatic train braking systems to replace current braking systems that date back to the 1850s!
La Coalition Concerns:
Emergency response should not be confused with emergency evacuation. Schools and other public facilities, particularly those where children are present, need hazmat-specific emergency response plans in preparation of an event requiring evacuation.
Historical examples of re-routing have led, instead, to increased capacity. Instead of eliminating or reducing the flow of high-hazard flammable trains through a densely populated area as promised by the industry, the flow of hazmat cargo simply increased elsewhere. Limits are needed to prevent industry efforts to expand in rural areas without reducing potential negative impacts in urban and suburban areas.
There is also the ethical perspective of, ‘Not in my backyard, how about yours?’ A school is a school, whether it’s urban, suburban, or rural. Re-routing isn’t a clean alternative.
