Chemical Safety Board Facilities

Open email to Sen. Boxer (California):

Dear Sen. Boxer,
    I am sending this to you, because you are the Chair Lady of the Senate Committee that oversees the activities of the Chemical Safety Board (CSB).
    For those persons who also read this email and who may not be familiar with the Chemical Safety Board, I am including a short description of its activities. The Chemical Safety Board is an advisory government agency. Its job is to investigate industrial chemical accidents and make recommendations to other agencies, including OSHA and the EPA to establish controls, so that those accidents are not repeated. A typical industrial chemical accident is the ammonium nitrate explosion at West, Texas. I have followed CSB activities for some years and am convinced that they do good work.
    More recently, there have been various complaints that the CSB is far behind in its schedule to investigate chemical industry accidents. The data seem to confirm the validity of this complaint.
    However, Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso and Managing Director Daniel Horowitz say the Board, which has a $10.55 million annual budget, is stretched thin and must decide which of the 200 or so “high-consequence” accidents that take place in the United States each year merit its attention. The number of chemical industrial accidents has also increased, because of the increasing activity involving new plants and reconstruction, based on the new natural gas fracking.. Horowitz says, “We’ve asked for a Houston office. We’ve asked for additional investigators for many years".
Sen. Boxer, I am one of the first to normally recommend reducing government expenses, in view of our overextended federal budget and increasing national debt, but some things are significant with respect to the general economy. This is one. Chemical industrial accidents immediately reduce productivity and increase unemployment, which is contrary to our desires for economic improvement.
I strongly suggest you work with Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso and Managing Director Daniel Horowitz to supply the CSB with the funding it needs for the number of investigators necessary for the Board to do its job.
As a side issue, I have noticed that Managing Director Horowitz also complains that when the Board makes recommendations after an accident investigation, OSHA and the EPA either ignore or are slow to accept these recommendations in developing and applying control regulations to avoid accident repetition.