In January of 2004, a small company named T2 Laboratories, located in Jacksonville, Florida, started commercial production of a new product — a chemical called methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (or MCMT for short), which they planned to sell as a gasoline additive under the name “Ecotane.”
By 2007, Ecotane had become T2’s primary product. But MCMT, a highly unstable chemical, carried risks T2’s founders didn’t understand. And on December 19 of that year, as they worked on their 175th batch of MCMT, those risks caught up with them:
The co-owner of Jacksonville’s T2 Laboratories spent his life’s last frantic minutes trying to stop a runaway chemical reaction he didn’t fully understand…
Robert Scott Gallagher waved for employees to get away from a reactor chamber, telling one worker a fire was about to start, according to the assessment by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
Then Gallagher, a 49-year-old father of five, went back inside the reactor’s concrete block control room and tried to stop the disaster.
Within minutes, he and three others were killed as the blast wiped out the Northside plant and wrecked neighboring businesses on Faye Road.
The blast caused by the failure of T2’s chemical reactor hit Jacksonville with the force of 1,400 pounds of TNT, throwing debris more than a thousand feet and shattering windows for a quarter mile. The blast killed four T2 personnel and wounded four more — a shattering toll for the small company, which had just 12 employees. Outside T2, 28 people working in the vicinity were also injured.
A video shows graphically what went wrong at T2 that day:
That video was released yesterday by the Chemical Safety Board (CSB), the Federal agency that is responsible for investigating chemical accidents. It summarizes the findings of the CSB’s investigation into the T2 disaster, which they also released yesterday in a draft report.
The report finds that T2 didn’t fully understand the potential risk of a runaway reaction when working with MCMT; that they failed to provide backup cooling systems, which could have prevented such a reaction, in case the primary one failed; and that the pressure-relief systems in place to stop a runaway reaction once it began were inadequate to the task when the moment came.
All of which answers the question of what happened that terrible day in Jacksonville. But it doesn’t answer the logical next question: what can be done to ensure that no similar disaster strikes another community in the future?
On this question, the CSB report is strangely wobbly. Noting that T2’s founders had only bachelor’s degrees in chemistry, and that the risks of reactive chemicals like MCMT are typically not covered in university curricula at that level, they call for changes in chemical engineering curricula to broaden awareness of reactive chemicals and their risks.
But what does that mean in practice? The Charleston, West Virginia Gazette, in an excellent blog post, explains:
Conspicuously absent from the CSB report was a repeat of the board’s recommendation that OSHA and EPA rewrite their rules to more closely regulate the handling of highly reactive chemicals…
You see, the CSB produced a major report way back in October 2002 that examined the serious danagers of working with highly reactive chemicals. Board investigators spent more than two years examining 167 serious chemical accidents over 20 years that involved uncontrolled reactions and resulted in 108 deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage.
The report concluded that reactive chemical accidents — where one or more chemicals suddenly react or decompose, producing severe heating and rising pressures — pose “a significant problem” and that pertinent federal safety regulations contained “significant gaps” in their applicability and in their specific provisions. For example, CSB investigators found that more than half of the 167 surveyed incidents involved chemicals not covered by OSHA process safety management or EPA risk management rules.
The board recommended that OSHA and EPA both rewrite their rules to specifically cover these kinds of reactive chemical accidents…
Since the CSB’s 2002 recommendation, there have been nearly 250 other reactive chemical incidents, killing a total of three people, injuring 220 and forcing the evacuation of more than 24,000.
In 2003, the CSB specifically criticized OSHA for failing to implement the board’s 2002 recommendation, terming OSHA’s response “unacceptable.”
Change to Win health and safety coordinator Eric Frumin explained to the Florida Times-Union why this omission is so troubling:
“The Chemical Safety Board was created to be the ultimate watchdog on federal regulatory agencies, and it seems like the watchdog has gone to sleep,” said Eric Frumin, safety and health coordinator for a union group called Change to Win. He said some members of the safety board, appointed by former President George W. Bush, “have a clear bias against strong health and safety regulations.”
Electing President Barack Obama was a huge step towards a government that works for the people again — but the T2 report shows clearly that it can’t be the last step. We need leaders at every level of government, in every regulatory agency, who are willing to fight to put workers’ lives and public safety before the corporate bottom line.
And we need them before another community has to deal with a tragedy like Jacksonville’s.