Yesterday night, I offered testimony to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a public listening to on the proposed rule on the Risk Management Program (RMP). The RMP requires the roughly 12,000 services throughout the United States that use extraordinarily hazardous substances to develop Risk Management Plans that establish prevention and response measures for chemical disasters. The program was gutted in 2019 below the Trump administration and, following a collection of listening classes in 2021, the EPA below Michael Regan’s management proposed the “Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention” rule. The proposal partially restores some prevention and response measures, however we expect the rule might go additional to forestall catastrophic incidents and defend public well being and security.
This week, EPA held three days of public hearings the place chemical security and environmental justice advocates, group organizers, and public well being practitioners shared their experience and known as for a stronger rule. I testified alongside two of my UCS colleagues, calling on EPA to require RMP services to implement measures to forestall releases throughout excessive climate occasions; to require services to transition to safer processes and applied sciences; and to supply public, on-line entry to RMP facility info and danger administration plans.
In addition to this week’s hearings, EPA is accepting written comments on the rule by means of October 31. For tips on writing a public remark of your personal, see our comment guide on this situation.
Here’s my full testimony:
Hello, my identify is Darya Minovi and I’m a Senior Analyst on the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
We are inspired to see that EPA has explicitly required, for the primary time, consideration of pure hazards, resembling flooding, wildfires, and winter storms in hazard opinions for Program 2 and three services. The science on the accelerating local weather disaster is obvious, and its far previous time that the company requires services to account for these inevitable and worsening hazards. As revealed in a 2021 evaluation co-authored by UCS, not less than one-third of RMP services nationwide are positioned in areas susceptible to inland and coastal flooding, storm surge, or wildfires. A report revealed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office earlier this 12 months had related findings.
We urge EPA to keep up this proposed requirement however imagine it may be strengthened. To be certain that hazards should not solely assessed, but in addition addressed, EPA should require services weak to pure hazards to implement measures to forestall chemical disasters, resembling backup energy programs. Without a requirement, services will not be adequately outfitted to forestall double disasters – incidents the place a extreme climate occasion, which alone could also be extraordinarily damaging, catalyzes a catastrophic chemical disaster that causes compounding hurt. These incidents additionally stand to disproportionately hurt folks of colour, as EPA’s personal analysis exhibits that the worst results of local weather change can be felt by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.
We would additionally like to induce EPA to heed the advice of many others testifying this week, to broaden the scope of the Safer Technology Alternatives Assessment, or STAA. The present proposal limits the STAA requirement to lower than 5 % of RMP services, and EPA has not offered enough proof for why the proposal focuses solely on refineries and chemical producers inside one mile of each other. The individuals who dwell and work close to these services already face the burden of ongoing, on a regular basis emissions of poisonous substances, along with the chance of a hazardous incident. Furthermore, limiting the STAA is in direct opposition with EPA’s personal rationale. When creating the 2017 Chemical Disaster Rule, the company wrote that “the first choice for managing chemical hazards and risks is the use of inherently safer technology or inherently safer design.” EPA should require an STAA and implementation of inherently safer applied sciences and design for the entire most probably harmful services, together with petroleum, coal, chemical, and pulp and paper manufacturing processes, and wastewater remedy and fertilizer vegetation.
If EPA is to meet its dedication to advance environmental justice, and work to treatment many years of hurt to fenceline communities, the company should prioritize prevention measures within the closing rule. While we’re inspired by the expanded scope of hazard opinions, merely requiring services to evaluate hazards doesn’t be certain that these harms are alleviated. The practically 200 million individuals who dwell in worst case situation zones for chemical disasters can not be accountable for holding these services accountable. We will submit extra detailed written feedback and stay up for seeing a closing rule that prioritizes public and employee security over the wants of companies that stand to financially profit from weak regulation. Thank you.