WASHINGTON — The government has no way of fully knowing which U.S. chemical facilities stock ammonium nitrate, the substance that exploded last year at a Texas fertilizer plant and killed 14 people, congressional investigators say.
Outdated federal policies, poor information sharing with states and a raft of industry exemptions point to scant federal oversight, says a new report obtained by The Associated Press. The report found regulatory gaps in environmental and worker protections and urged broad changes to U.S. safety rules.
President Barack Obama pledged to stiffen enforcement following the explosion April 17, 2013, in West, Texas.
Without improved monitoring, federal regulators “will not know the extent to which dangerous conditions at some facilities may continue to exist,” concluded the report by the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO found that the Homeland Security Department’s database captured only a fraction of the ammonium nitrate storage facilities in the U.S. The federal database shows that 1,345 facilities in 47 states store ammonium nitrate. But spot checks of similar state records found that the federal list missed as many as two-thirds of the storage sites, the report said, faulting companies’ noncompliance, legal loopholes or poor federal coordination with states.
About half of the facilities that are in the federal database were in six states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas. They include chemical plants or any location that stores ammonium nitrate, a widely used fertilizer, such as farm supply retailers or fertilizer distribution warehouses.
The government audit tracked a monthlong reporting effort last year by AP that drew upon public records in 28 states.
Facilities that store ammonium nitrate rarely are inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including the one that blew up in Texas, in part because the agency relies on EPA regulations that do not list ammonium nitrate as a hazardous material.
“We believe that we have already made significant improvements to reduce the likelihood of ammonium nitrate incidents,” wrote David Michaels, an assistant Labor Department secretary for occupational safety and health.
The GAO report noted that U.S. safety standards typically fell short compared with those in Canada, France, Germany and Britain, which in many cases bar the use of wood or other combustible material in ammonium storage facilities.
