“It was not uncommon; it’s what they do. But there was something going on that was different.” — C.W.Sigman, Director of Kanawha County Emergency Management At about 9:30 am on Wednesday morning, April 22, 2026, two chemicals reacted to form hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas, at the small Catalyst Refiners facility in Institute, West Virginia. [...]
“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” — Malcolm Gladwell Facilities in the chemical process industries were required to report accidental release events to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) beginning back in March 2020. These included incidents [...]
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson Last year, the administration announced its intention to shutter the Chemical Safety Board. The chemical process industries rallied around this life-saving agency, and to our relief, funding was restored, almost, in [...]
“Anyone can see a forest fire. Skill lies in sniffing the first smoke.” — Robert A. Heinlein One of my children has a house in The Ville, the neighborhood in north St. Louis that a tornado ripped through in May 2025. Since that tornado, I’ve become adept with a chainsaw, cutting into firewood the felled [...]
“Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.” – Charles Kettering I am the blacksmith at a historic village. I burn coke, coke I make right there on the forge. I start by laying bituminous coal around the coke [...]
“Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix.” — Yuvai Noah Harari Not surprisingly, eighteen of the thirty incidents in Volume 3 of the Chemical Safety Board’s series on incident reports addressed incidents at refineries and large chemical complexes. One incident in Volume 3, though, was [...]
“We must be part of the general staff at the inception, rather than the ambulance drivers at the bitter end.” — Lane Kirkland Despite being established under the authority of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which has not been repealed, the Trump administration intends to discontinue funding the Chemical Safety Board as of [...]
“I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” — Winston Churchill The Chemical Safety Board (CSB) describes its public safety mission as being to "drive chemical safety excellence through independent investigations to protect communities, workers, and the environment" with the vision of "a nation free from chemical disasters." The CSB’s [...]
“If they knew it was water-reactive, why did they store it in a warehouse with automatic sprinklers?” — Chris Schmidt, retired pre-school teacher Wikipedia is a “go-to” source for quick information. Regarding the fire at the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia, however, it has this disclaimer: “Information may change rapidly as the event progresses, and [...]
“Once you start something, finish it. Don’t accumulate a backlog of unfinished projects.” — Ed Bliss If you are on the Chemical Safety Board’s distribution list, you may have noticed a lot of trade releases from the CSB in your in-box during the last few weeks. They’ve been busy. A recent press release proudly announced [...]
