Saving Pennies at the Cost of Lives

By David McCall
USW International President

Workers at the former BP-Husky refinery in Oregon, Ohio, demanded answers after losing two colleagues—brothers, each with a young family—in a fire three years ago.

The members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1-346 knew that an independent, root-cause investigation offered the best means of honoring their fallen co-workers and making the facility a safer place to work.

They also realized that getting to the bottom of the tragedy and holding management accountable would help to safeguard workers at other refineries, potentially sparing others the heartache they experienced.

And so these USW members looked to the lone federal agency with the skill and tenacity to get the job done—the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, commonly known as the CSB.

The CSB investigates chemical-related incidents, delivers detailed reports on what went wrong and makes recommendations for averting future calamities. It’s well regarded not only for its professionalism and dedication but for the copious work it accomplishes with a minuscule staff and small budget.

This 27-year-old agency saves workers’ lives while also protecting the communities around chemical plants. Yet Donald Trump wants to kill it.

“We need that,” fumed Kyle Downour, unit chair for Local 1-346, who worked closely with CSB investigators in the days, weeks and months after the fire.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s ignorance,” he said of Trump’s plan, noting that anyone who spends even an hour in a refinery grasps the many dangers of working there and the importance of sustaining the CSB.

Trump wants to abolish the CSB as part of his broader, nonsensical scheme to gut essential agencies, including the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

These agencies have separate roles. Collectively, they compose an essential safety net for workers.

For example, OSHA sets and enforces workplace standards across numerous industries, while the CSB focuses exclusively on chemical and petrochemical incidents, oftentimes pinpointing not one catastrophic malfunction but a chain of breakdowns and system failures culminating in disaster.

The CSB lacks the authority to issue fines or citations, but its findings and recommendations carry enormous weight with unions, industry, federal agencies, Congress, state governments, community organizations and trade groups.

“They’re like 50 people. The work they do with that number of people is amazing,” said Downour, observing that the CSB’s $14 million budget represents a tiny sliver of federal spending and that eliminating the agency would mean saving the government pennies at the expense of workers’ lives.

Unions, industry groups and safety experts all oppose Trump’s efforts to eliminate the agency, which he unsuccessfully tried to do several years ago during his first failed administration.

The CSB operates with transparency. It provides periodic updates about investigations and holds regular public meetings about its work, with an open question-and-answer component at the end of each session.

Each of the CSB’s final reports include a page dedicated to the victims of that incident.

In addition, the agency’s reenactment videos provide recommendations that enable employers and workers across the country to assess their own safety systems and ask, “Is there anything similar we have here? Do we need to make changes?” explained Downour, who watched those videos long before the tragedy at his own refinery, today owned by Cenovus.

Downour recalled the empathetic but clear-eyed approach of the CSB representatives who arrived there in the wake of the incident.

“You know that they just want to find the answers. You don’t want anybody else to ever go through this,” said Downour, noting he and his co-workers had input into every phase of the investigation and the opportunity to raise questions they considered crucial.

“There was never a sense that they weren’t there to help,” he added. “They never left us out of anything. They empower the voice of the workers affected by this tragedy.”

The CSB’s final report determined that a “a series of cascading” system and process malfunctions over 24 hours contributed to the fire, which was ultimately sparked by the release of a flammable liquid called naphtha.

The agency recommended sweeping improvements to refinery operations. It also recommended industrywide safety enhancements and urged two trade organizations, the American Petroleum Institute and the International Society of Automation, to help drive safer practices among their members.

Life-saving recommendations like that “last forever,” benefiting workers anew each day, pointed out USW Local 248 President Bob Garrou, who works at a Packaging Corp. of America (PCA) facility in Tomahawk, Wis.

In 2008, three of Garrou’s co-workers died and a fourth sustained injuries when a tank containing recycled water and fiber waste exploded during welding repairs.

After an investigation, CSB warned paper companies and workers nationwide about the flammable nature of decomposing pulp. It was a previously unrecognized hazard that paper workers likely faced every day.

“You don’t think about rotting wood being explosive, but it is,” said Garrou, who ensures that all newly hired workers at PCA understand the danger and believes that their counterparts at other facilities also remain safer today because of CSB’s widely circulated safety bulletin.

“The CSB really opened our eyes, and I refuse to let them be shut,” he added. “The CSB educated me and gave me really good tools for educating my members.”

To him, Trump’s push to eliminate the agency has little to do with the federal budget. Rather, it speaks to Trump’s indifference to worker safety and willingness to help corporations cut corners wherever they can.

“They pay for themselves every day,” Garrou said of the CSB’s experts. “I can’t believe they’re on the chopping block.”