INSTITUTE, W.Va. — Safety lapses that led to a runaway chemical reaction caused a fatal blast at a Bayer CropScience plant in August, federal investigators said Thursday.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s preliminary report came two days after a congressional inquiry into the Aug. 28 blast that killed two people at the plant west of Charleston.
A congressional committee report for that inquiry said the explosion came close to compromising a tank holding methyl isocyanate, or MIC, the chemical that killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India, when it leaked from a former Union Carbide plant in 1984. Carbide once operated the West Virginia plant, which is now owned by Bayer CropScience.
The tank holds about 13,000 pounds of MIC, said Chemical Safety Board chairman John Bresland. No other facility in the U.S. stores MIC in such amounts, he said.
Bayer CropScience said in a statement Thursday that it had made improvements since the explosion and that its top priority remained the safety of workers and the nearby community.
One worker died in the blast and the second died days later from burns. Eight others, including several volunteer firefighters, reported symptoms of chemical exposure.
“There were significant lapses in the plant’s process safety management, including inadequate training on new equipment and the overriding of critical safety systems,” Bresland said.
