Company Seen as Trying to Hide Details of West Virginia Blast
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: April 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — When a huge explosion occurred last August at a West Virginia chemical plant, managers refused to tell emergency responders for several hours about the location of the incident or the toxic chemical it released, and they later misused a law intended to keep information from terrorists to try to stop federal investigators from learning what happened, members of a House subcommittee said Tuesday.
The explosion, at Bayer CropScience, in Institute, W. Va., killed two employees and sickened six volunteer firefighters. It was felt 10 miles away, and a tank weighing several thousand pounds “rocketed 50 feet through the plant,” committee investigators found. Fortunately it did not go in the direction of a tank holding the same chemical that killed thousands in a 1984 chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India.
That tank was protected by a woven metal blanket designed to stop shrapnel, but
the company destroyed the blanket before investigators could see it, according to the committee.
Devices meant to detect releases of the chemical, methyl isocyanate, known as MIC, had been disabled, and video cameras had been disconnected, steps that “raise concerns about an orchestrated effort by Bayer to shroud the explosion in secrecy,” said the subcommittee chairman, Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan.
After the Bhopal catastrophe, Congress created an independent agency, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board to investigate chemical accidents in this country. But the president and chief executive of Bayer, William Buckner, said in his prepared testimony that company officials believed they could “refuse to provide information” to the board.
Later, Mr. Buckner said,
company officials labeled some documents as having security-sensitive information in order to “discourage the C.S.B. from even seeking this information.” The company acted under a 2002 law intended to make ports more secure; the company brings barges in on the Kanawha River. The company asserted that it was under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard, an agency that does not have extensive experience in chemical processing.
Criticism of the company was bi-partisan. “Allowing inappropriate use of sensitive security information designations to hide inconvenient facts is not acceptable, and undermines public safety,” said Greg Walden, the ranking Republican member of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22chemical.html?hp
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