The federal agency that frequently investigates chemical disasters in Houston and elsewhere is struggling to function amid an exodus of investigators and management’s push toward more lenient treatment of industry, interviews and documents show.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is down from 20 investigators to 12. With the recent departure of its chairwoman, its five-member board now only has three members with no indication that the Trump administration, which has recommended eliminating the agency, will replace anyone.

The safety board uncovered the festering problems at BP that led its Texas City refinery to explode, killing 15 and injuring 180 in 2005, and its report led to a reformed corporate safety culture. The board showed how loose regulations and poor communication doomed 15 Texas firefighters at West Fertilizer in 2013, leading to new Texas rules on ammonium nitrate. And when four workers died at DuPont’s La Porte pesticide plant in 2014, only the CSB had the independence and expertise to call out the management failures and botched emergency response.

The CSB is an independent agency that does not fine companies or issue violations. Its mission is to find out how an incident occurred and provide recommendations to the company, government regulators and other stakeholders on how to prevent another.

But now there are fears the board wouldn’t be able to take on the next major disaster, said U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat whose 29th District includes the Houston Ship Channel.

“I don’t think they could with the staff capacity, the situation they’re in now,” Green said.

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In the last year, board chair Vanessa Allen Sutherland resigned, four investigators quit and investigators did not produce reports on multiple incidents, CSB documents show. Employees organized a successful unionization effort in response to low morale and reduced benefits. The agency — among the smallest in the federal government, with a budget of $12 million — is down to just 12 investigators.

It is lumbering ahead under the possibility of elimination by President Donald Trump, a threat that has nudged it closer to the industries it is supposed to scrutinize, some staff members said.

“I hope and pray the administration sees the benefits of the Chemical Safety Board doing this work,” Sutherland said in an interview. “It’s the only one that does it. The staff is very capable and the place will continue to strive.”

In the Houston area, a chemical incident occurs every six weeks, so the board’s investigators are frequently in Houston. But with the reduced number of investigators, not all major incidents in Houston are getting CSB attention.

On April 19, for example, a Valero refinery explosion injured 28 workers. The injured recently sued Valero in Harris County District Court, accusing the company of gross negligence. The CSB did not deploy, although it has did send investigators to the site of the Kuraray plant explosion in Pasadena last month.

Less-detailed investigations?

Former President Barack Obama appointed Sutherland as chair about three years ago in part to restore order to an agency with a host of organizational problems, including a big investigative backlog and complaints that it was overzealous toward industry. But troubles are emerging again as she exits.

“When I started as the chair, I can’t imagine a more difficult situation,” Sutherland said. “I hope my legacy is that we’re not where we were in August 2015.”

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Current and former staff members agree the situation did stabilize at first under Sutherland. Congress eased its scrutiny once former chair Rafael Moure-Eraso stepped down. Sutherland repaired relationships with the petrochemical industry and calmed fears that the CSB was using its investigations to give companies a public shaming.

“After she came in, I thought she did a good job engaging her key stakeholders,” said Shakeel Kadri, executive director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety, a global nonprofit corporate group that focuses on safety in the chemical industry.

Staffers say that the agency has taken a turn away from detailed looks at incidents. A memo from six of the agency’s investigators, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, says that the agency wants to avoid analyzing a company’s safety culture and is pushing shorter investigations.

The memo says leadership wants to end the practice of circulating drafts of reports to the company, union officials and experts before they are finished. It also says management wants to outsource the writing of investigative reports.

This would be a shift away from the type of investigation done for the 2005 BP Texas City explosion, said Johnnie Banks, the former supervisory investigator of the CSB team based out of Washington, D.C., who retired in 2017 after working for the agency for most of its existence.

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That explosion killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. Most of the victims were working in trailers near where the explosion occurred.

“It spoke to the real core guiding principles of the type of incident investigation that was valued,” Banks said of the BP Texas City report. “It got to the real cause, not just the operator or people doing something wrong but how a corporation’s decisions could have major impact on single facilities.”

The BP report led to multiple changes at the company including a new board member with a focus on safety, an independent panel to examine safety issues at the company and a new incident reporting program.

CSB recommendations also led to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration creating a national emphasis program for oil refineries and an industry-wide effort to move temporary trailers out of hazardous areas at facilities.

Chair wants open mind

But the agency wants to eliminate finding the human factors that cause incidents from reports, according to the memo.

Sutherland rejected the idea that the CSB was backing off from looking at the root causes and human factors in chemical incidents.

“We can’t assume that just because a report doesn’t have safety culture, it means we didn’t look for it,” Sutherland said.

Sutherland she wants investigators to go into their work with an open mind. She said there’s no push to write less aggressive reports.

“The people on the ground would know if we’re doing that,” Sutherland said. “It wouldn’t be a secret if we were burying this or cutting that. We’re not doing this in a bubble.”

The investigators’ list of concerns also states that no new investigators were hired during Sutherland’s time as board chair, despite money being returned to the federal government every year. Experienced investigators left, believing they were being pushed out after their qualifications were questioned.

Sutherland blames the lack of hiring on the chaos under her predecessor. The agency had no official job descriptions for investigators and no one knew where they should fit on the federal employee pay schedule. She says it took her most of her term as chair to resolve such human resources issues. A recently released Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General report said the CSB fixed 17 of those problems since a 2015 report.

Tom Zoeller, a senior adviser to the board, says the agency will be looking to fill those empty investigator roles in the next few months. The current situation will make it hard to fill those jobs, said Sam Mannan, director of the Texas A&M Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center.

“What do you tell potential employees?” Mannan asked. “You’ll have a job for a year? We’ll play it day by day or we don’t know? That’s no way to hire quality investigators.”

Board members leave

More problems lie ahead.

The board is down to three members: Manuel Ehrlich, Rick Engler, and Kristen Kulinowski. Ehrlich’s term ends next year. The terms of Engler and Kulinowski end in 2020, before the next presidential election.

There’s little indication that President Trump would appoint new board members to an agency he has twice targeted for elimination. In its 2019 budget, the administration said the board’s work duplicated that of other agencies such as OSHA. OSHA, however, only looks at compliance with worker safety laws, and doesn’t drill down to the root causes of incidents.

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No one at the CSB knows what would happen once all the board members are gone.

“There’s no playbook for shutting an agency down,” Zoeller said. “We’ll be like Arkema where we can see the disaster coming but we’ll have to play it be ear.”

The CSB recently reported on the fires at Arkema’s chemical plant in Crosby during Hurricane Harvey. The plant lost power and its volatile organic peroxides warmed, catching fire and leading to a widespread evacuation. The board cited the company’s lack of preparation as one of the causes of the incident.

Early in the agency’s existence, the board was reduced to two board members, but not for long. Mannan remembers what the agency was like back then. There was a period of waiting for someone to come in and fix its problems.

“That’s the best-case scenario under the Trump administration,” Mannan said. “Who knows? Someone might be appointed to turn out the last light.”

Banks, the retired investigations supervisor, remembers what it was like before the CSB existed. He was working for Chevron at the time, investigating potential safety incidents. Banks remembered wishing there was an agency out there that delved deeper than OSHA into incident investigations.

“People were weary,” Banks said, “of dead bodies being picked out of the rubble at refineries and chemical plants.”

CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN: In November 2014, four workers died at a DuPont plant in La Porte after being exposed to a toxic gas. Responding emergency workers weren't sure what was in the air. The surrounding community wasn't, either. A Houston Chronicle investigation explores where another fatal mistake could have the largest consequences and probes the regulatory failures that put us in jeopardy.

Matt Dempsey is the data editor for the Houston Chronicle. He joined the Chronicle in 2014 and has worked on several major projects, including the investigation on the dangers of chemical plants. Matt previously worked for the Arizona Republic and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Contact him at matt.dempsey@chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @mizzousundevil.

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