A year before a Georgia chemical plant fire engulfed an Atlanta suburb in toxic gas this week, a federal watchdog agency issued a warning: the plant, and others like it, were not covered by regulations intended to prevent catastrophic chemical accidents.
Yet despite years of outcry from environmentalists, powerful chemical industry lobbyists have kept regulators from updating these rules to include these facilities, potentially leaving workers and communities across the country at greater risk of devastating toxic disasters.
Over the last five years, there have been hundreds of chemical accidents at facilities that are not covered by these regulations, watchdog groups have found.
When a fire ignited at BioLab’s facility in Conyers, Georgia, early on Sunday, September 29, it set off a chemical reaction that sent a plume of toxic gas into the air, triggering evacuation orders for nearly seventy thousand nearby residents and warnings that ninety thousand others should shelter in place. Photos of the massive, dark clouds billowing from the chemical plant and the city of Atlanta enveloped in a chlorine haze spread nationwide.
That morning, local resident Christina Brown woke up to the news of the accident four miles away. By the afternoon, she said, a haze had descended on the home she shares with her husband and two dogs — what she assumed was chlorine gas, the toxin that investigators have since detected in the air.
While Brown and her husband initially fled Conyers to stay with family several hours away, by Wednesday, October 2, the couple returned home so Brown’s husband could go to work, even with the plume still overhead and ongoing shelter-in-place warnings being issued by the county. Since returning, Brown said she has…
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Auteur: Katya Schwenk
