WASHINGTON, D.C. — A fire that erupted Monday night at a fertilizer plant in Winston-Salem, NC continues to burn endangering thousands of people in the area who have had to evacuate or shelter-in-place. The threat of a deadly explosion remains as the fire continues to burn out of control, threatening the health and safety of the nearby communities. This tragic chemical disaster poses unacceptable risk to those who live, work, or go to school near facilities like this, yet they regularly happen all over the United States, despite being entirely preventable. Communities at the fenceline of the chemical industry in other communities live daily with similar harm and threat due to major gaps in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) federal rules on hazardous chemical storage, use, and industrial facility safety. It’s time for the EPA to prevent these harmful chemical disasters once and for all.

EPA must act now to strengthen the federal regulations and issue a strong new chemical disaster prevention rule so that no community will ever have to experience a tragedy like what is happening in Winston-Salem today.

As experts in worker health and safety, chemical disaster prevention, and advocates for environmental justice, we demand that EPA take action now to protect the public from this and other such environmental atrocities. No one, whether in Winston-Salem, or anywhere else, should be forced to live under the constant threat of disasters and explosions. That is a reality no one should have to face. The groups joining this statement hope that this incident does not become even graver and seek to offer support and concern for the community members who are sheltering in place today, and encourage the press to elevate their stories, photos, and tweets.

MORE BACKGROUND

Over one hundred chemical disasters occur annually in the U.S., showing the serious problems with EPA’s existing Clean Air Act Risk Management Plan (RMP) Rule, the federal regulations intended to prevent chemical disasters. Accidental explosions of ammonium nitrate fertilizers are among the most deadly industrial disasters in U.S. history. Nearly 600 residents were killed by a massive fertilizer explosion in Texas City, Texas, in 1947. In 2013, 15 first responders and workers were killed by the ammonium nitrate explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas. Less than two years ago, more than 200 people were killed and thousands more injured in Beirut, Lebanon by detonation of ammonium nitrate fertilizers.

Ammonium nitrate is not subject to the federal RMP rules, even though fenceline communities have called for EPA to regulate this chemical - and facilities that use this chemical like fertilizer plants — under this program for years.

At President Biden’s direction, the EPA is currently undertaking a review of the RMP rules and, last summer, held listening sessions and took public comments. Fenceline communities and environmental groups, scientists and health experts, workers, national security experts, the Blue Green Alliance, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, and many members of the public called for the EPA to strengthen RMP regulations and to include ammonium nitrate facilities under an expanded coverage of the chemical disaster prevention program. A core objective of the comments EPA received is the need for EPA to focus on prevention of chemical disasters in the first place.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has also called for stronger regulation of ammonium nitrate and a preliminary report it issued after the 2013 West Fertilizer explosion recognized that the fertilizer industry has produced alternatives that practically eliminate the risk of accidental explosion posed by ammonium nitrate. The final report of the CSB highlights the devastation that the explosion caused to the surrounding community. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer products have also been used as homemade weapons against Americans, including by the domestic terrorists and perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

In January 2022, over 70+ state and local elected officials sent a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, calling for stronger RMP and chemical disaster prevention rules.

Chemical disasters are all too common in the U.S. Just days before this incident, a chemical disaster occurred in Westlake, Louisiana. For information on this and other recent incidents, see the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters website (which includes incidents at both RMP covered and non-covered facilities).

Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Center for Progressive Reform, Coming Clean, Earthjustice, Public Citizen, and Sierra Club are all members of the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, a group of experts and advocates working to advance the use of safer chemicals and processes that protect our communities from catastrophic chemical disasters.

For more information about the work of Earth Justice, click here to visit their website

For related documents about recent chemical disasters click here

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A ProPublica Report, February 2, 2022

Reno Seeks Motels for

Affordable Housing

by Anjeanette Damon

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

For more than five years, the mayor of Reno, Nevada, has supported the demolition of dozens of dilapidated motels that provided shelter for thousands of residents squeezed by the city’s housing crisis, rather than rehabilitate the buildings to provide affordable housing. Now she’s changing course.

Mayor Hillary Schieve is proposing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire and rehabilitate motels in downtown through the Reno Housing Authority. In fact, the agency has already moved quietly to buy two shuttered buildings. Last week, the agency submitted an offer to buy the Bonanza Inn, a closed 58-unit motel with a history of code violations that is now part of an estate sale. It also submitted a letter of intent to make an offer on a much larger property — the 19-story former Sundowner casino-hotel.

Details of the offers — the prices, contingencies and financing — are not public. The RHA’s board of commissioners discussed the offers last month in a series of closed-door meetings allowed under an exemption in the state’s open meeting law. An RHA spokesperson said the agency has enough funds to purchase the Bonanza Inn but would need to secure financing for the Sundowner purchase. An early estimate by the RHA indicated it would cost $22 million to buy both properties and up to $50 million to rehab the buildings.

The purchases would be the beginning of a broader effort to increase affordable housing in the region, Schieve said. She supports using part of the city’s share of federal stimulus money from the American Rescue Plan Act and would like to see the state, the county and the neighboring city of Sparks chip in money, as they do for other regional projects such as Reno’s homeless shelter. Schieve also wants to explore whether the housing authority can use its existing housing stock as collateral for bonds to help finance more affordable housing. She’d like to borrow at least $200 million. She didn’t provide details on her plans for the additional funding.

“We have a real opportunity when it comes to workforce and affordable housing,” Schieve said.

The city’s about-face follows a ProPublica investigation that found Reno did little to deter the demolition of similar motels that housed some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Nor did the city provide any incentives for landowners to replace that housing. One developer, casino-owner Jeff Jacobs, has been responsible for most of the motel demolitions, razing nearly 600 housing units since 2017. Schieve and other council members posed for photos during some of those demolitions, celebrating the elimination of what they said were blighted properties to make way for a proposed entertainment district.

After widespread criticism of the demolitions, Jacobs recently announced he would be willing to donate up to $15 million in land for an affordable housing and public parking project. The donation would be contingent on the housing authority financing the project and the city acquiring additional land, he said.

Jacobs has been assembling more than 100 parcels in downtown Reno for what he describes as a $1.8 billion entertainment district that would include hotels, restaurants and an amphitheater. He said the motels he demolished were slums that couldn’t be remodeled and said he provided relocation assistance to most of the people who lived in them.

The property sought by the Reno Housing Authority sits within Jacobs’ proposed district, directly across from his signature casino, the Sands Regency. In fact, the agency’s letter of intent on the Sundowner includes a vacant parcel on a block primarily owned by Jacobs.

The Sundowner has been vacant since 2003. The Bonanza Inn, however, was only recently listed for sale following the death of its owner. Her son told the Reno Gazette Journal that the estate was forced to sell the motel, which had been vacant for more than a year, following aggressive code enforcement efforts by the city. His family couldn’t afford to make the required repairs, he told the newspaper. The property had been cited multiple times for code violations since 2012, according to public records.

In an interview with ProPublica, Schieve reiterated that she doesn’t think “slumlords should be landlords,” but also said she doesn’t favor wholesale demolition of the hotels.

“If you can rehab something, then that’s great, obviously, and if it makes sense to,” Schieve said. “I honestly believe in saving everything you can.”

She added, “I’m not like, ‘Let’s demolish everything.’ That’s not who I am.” Rather, she said, she doesn’t believe people should be forced to live in terrible conditions.

This is the city’s first attempt, however, at preserving such buildings. In addition to supporting Jacobs’ razing of mostly squalid motels, the city used its blight fund in 2016 to finance the demolition of two vacant motels despite pleas from the community to preserve them as housing.

Schieve said the city hasn’t had the financial resources to buy and rehab motels for housing. Federal stimulus money has now made it possible to pursue such acquisitions, she said.

“It’s tough to build it. It’s expensive,” she said. “With the ARPA funds, it really gives us a foot in the door.”

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Effects of Wildfire Smoke

NPR California, September 28, Sacramento, CA

Dangerous Air: We Mapped

The Rise in Wildfire Smoke Across America

Here's How Did it

By Alison Saldanha

NPR’s California Newsroom partnered with Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab to map the increasing prevalence of wildfire smoke across the United States. The months long analysis, based on more than 10 years of data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reveals a startling increase in the number of days residents are breathing smoke at the ZIP code level — across California and the Pacific Northwest to Denver and Salt Lake City in the Rocky Mountains and rural Kentucky and West Virginia in Appalachia.

Click here to read the rest of the article

and enter your zip code for a local report