US sees unprecedented number of chemical plant fatalities in past year

Thirty-six people died from on-the-job chemical accidents in the US in a recent 11-month period, “the largest number of fatalities ever investigated by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) in a comparable time period,” a top US chemical safety official said in June.

Steve Owens, chairperson and one of two current CSB commissioners, presented the figures at the board’s latest quarterly public meeting June 18. The board is an independent body created to find the root cause of chemically related accidents and promote solutions so they can be prevented in the future.

Owens called the stream of accidents “heartbreaking.” He said the deaths were the result of operations at six companies and had occurred since last summer. Most of the victims were workers at a wide range of chemical and related industries but also included two children and their father on a factory visit.

The accidents took place at a variety of companies, and Owens declined to provide details on the reasons for the rise in fatalities, saying that CSB investigations into the causes are ongoing.

This recent rise in US deaths comes amid repeated efforts by the Donald J. Trump administration to defund the CSB and to rewrite a key industrial chemical safety regulation, the Risk Management Program (RMP). The proposed RMP changes, released in February, would save chemical industries billions of dollars and affect more than 11,000 chemical manufacturers and refineries, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. But they would also increase risks to workers at the facilities as well as community members living nearby, say safety advocates, community groups, and the CSB.

But the EPA says in the proposed rule that the current RMP is burdensome, unnecessarily complex, and will not lead to a safer workplace.

A history of chemical accident investigations

In the mid-1980s, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) was concerned about frequent chemical accidents in his state and stalled government-led accident investigations. As a result, he added provisions to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to create the CSB, though neither President George H. W. Bush nor President Bill Clinton provided funding for the board. But Lautenberg reupped his efforts when the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) failed to investigate an accident at the Napp Technologies facility in 1995 that killed five workers not far from the senator’s home.

Lautenberg succeeded in securing $4 million funding for the CSB in 1998, and it was off and running.

Since then, the board has investigated and issued reports on at least 130 accidents and produced over 100 safety videos that are used by companies and workers worldwide.

On March 23, 2020, a new regulation went into effect: the accidental release reporting rule. It required companies to self-report significant chemical accidents and had the goal of adding clarity to industrial accident data that historically had been obscure.

Since then, US chemical and related companies have reported 651 accidents that would have qualified for a CSB investigation, as they resulted in a serious injury or a fatality, or caused $1 million or more in property damage. Most of the reported incidents were industrial, but some were nonindustrial chemical accidents—for instance, a leak of methane and other gases at the Prospect Ranch Dairy in Keenesburg, Colorado, on Aug. 20, 2025, that killed six.

The CSB has issued four volumes of incident reports with probable cause and other information on 94 of the 651 incidents. These incident reports are separate from and much shorter than the 130 full accident reports the CSB has done. Though the evaluation is ongoing, the 94 incidents include a total of 16 fatalities, 75 serious injuries, and more than $4.5 billion in property damage.

Four attempts to eliminate the CSB

The Trump administration has proposed eliminating the board on four occasions, saying it is redundant with the EPA and OSHA—both of which write and enforce safety and environmental regulations. But the CSB was created in response to the failure of those agencies to conduct timely investigations of chemical accidents.

Despite challenges, the CSB has received sufficient support from members of Congress—especially members from states with chemical facilities—to continue operating.

Most recently, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) successfully led a bipartisan effort in the House Appropriations Committee to provide $14 million for the CSB in fiscal 2027 after the president’s budget called for zero funding.

Speaking at a June 3 Appropriations Committee hearing, Perez pointed to the Nippon Dynawave Packaging plant, a 73-year-old facility in her district. On May 26, an accident there led to the release of a corrosive chemical solution that resulted in the deaths of 11 workers and the hospitalization of 8 others. “We have an aging infrastructure in America, and we are going to have more accidents like this,” she said, adding that CSB investigations will be needed even more in the future to provide answers that will help prevent accidents at old plants.

Industry associations such as the American Chemistry Council (ACC) have found that CSB reports are helpful to their member companies, says Jeff Sloan, the council’s senior director for regulatory and scientific affairs. Large chemical companies conduct their own accident investigations but, unlike the CSB, do not share them with other companies, which limits their value to industry.

Sloan stresses that the ACC would like the CSB to continue but declines to comment on the correct size of its budget. “We believe it should have adequate funds to carry out its core mission,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be enough to investigate every accident, but it should be adequate to carry out its root cause investigations and be able to apply those lessons to other facilities.”

In a June 2025 letter to Congress, however, the ACC, joined by the American Chemical Society (ACS publishes C&EN but is not involved in editorial decisions) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, urged appropriation of $17.4 million a year, matching the CSB’s request.

At a minimum, the board’s annual budget should be $14 million, as it has been in the past, says Rick Engler, a former CSB member who founded and is now a consultant to the New Jersey Work Environment Council, a collaboration of labor, community, and environmental organizations in the state. Engler says the board should have sufficient funds to improve, broaden, and simplify how it gathers and presents accident data.

“The data should also cross government agencies and include near misses,” Engler says. Eliminating the CSB would be “devastating” to US industrial safety, particularly if coupled with the proposed changes to the EPA’s RMP program, he says.

“Labor and community members will be placed at additional risk by both proposals,” Engler says. “Dismantling [the] CSB and removing the RMP’s modest reforms will lead to injuries and deaths and negative impacts on the country’s economic well-being. Often these accidents lead to layoffs and permanent shutdowns with devastating impacts on the local communities and workers’ families.”

In its plan to revise the RMP, the EPA proposes undoing a 2024 update that requires companies to consider and possibly implement safer technologies, requires third-party safety audits after an accident, and lets community members take part in plant-specific safety-related discussions.

However, in its regulatory proposal the EPA says the requirements would be costly and unnecessary, as companies had already reduced incidents without them.

An EPA spokesperson declined to comment directly on concerns that have been raised about proposed changes to the RMP and instead referred to the new RPM proposal itself.

Deadly chemical fertilizer accident led to first RMP overhaul

The 2024 updates to the RMP grew out of a 3-year federal multiagency investigation after an ammonium nitrate fertilizer accident at a farm warehouse in West, Texas, in 2013. Fifteen people were killed—most of them emergency responders—and much of a small town was flattened.

Most of industry’s concerns regarding the 2024 changes to the RMP center on provisions requiring companies to examine eliminating or limiting use of toxic chemicals and a shift to safer manufacturing processes. The EPA’s latest proposed changes would phase out these requirements except when companies are building new facilities.

The EPA estimates its proposed changes would save companies about $240 million a year; it says that over half of those savings would come from eliminating the safer chemicals and process requirements. The proposal has strong support from chemical companies, other manufacturers, and trade associations, including the ACC.

The ACC’s Sloan calls the 2024 provisions particularly burdensome and unnecessary. Rebecca O’Donnell, the council’s associate director of regulatory and scientific affairs, supports the EPA’s current stance. She says the best time to consider production changes is during the process-design phase, when it is easier and less costly to introduce new approaches—not during operations of a mature manufacturing facility.

“It is not that it’s a bad idea,” O’Donnell says, referring to the interest in finding safer chemicals and processes. “But after you’ve ordered the equipment and built the plant, you really have many fewer if any opportunities to introduce a new chemical, for instance, which may cause new problems downstream.”

But the CSB, in comments filed May 5, calls the EPA’s new RMP proposal “a significant step backwards after more than a decade of safety progress toward preventing catastrophic chemical accidents.” The CSB adds that it had urged the EPA to promulgate regulations on inherently safer technologies and designs for more than a decade. Many community groups and unions that also oppose the proposed changes echoed the board’s comments.

Separate from the future of the RMP is the question of whether the ongoing replacement of today’s aging plants with new facilities and processes presents opportunities to substitute safer chemicals and processes. O’Donnell says these discussions are taking place among ACC members but is unsure at what rate they may take a leap to safer chemicals.

The ACC cites its own industrial safety program, Responsible Care, as a reason the RMP is not needed. The group cites EPA data that its members have decreased RMP-covered process safety accidents by 22% since 2017. Still, recent CSB accident reports show that 20% of the companies identified by the board as having had serious accidents over the past 6 years are ACC members and therefore were engaged in Responsible Care practices.

Sloan responds that Responsible Care is a work in progress. “No regulatory program is going to demonstrate zero incidents,” he says. “The Responsible Care program is intended to drive continuous improvements as well as transparency and accountability, and the data developed under our programs show we are having success.”

While efforts to fully defund the CSB will probably fail, as they have in recent years, the EPA is moving ahead with its RMP revision. The comment period for the proposed changes ended in May, and the agency tells C&EN that a final regulation is likely to go into effect in 2027, if not before.