Federal and state laws require facilities storing dangerous chemicals to file chemical inventory and emergency planning reports with emergency response personnel. The public has a right to know where these facilities are and what hazards they contain, the laws state. But because companies selling ammonium nitrate-based fertilizers to consumers are exempt from these laws, officials can’t regulate them.

It was deficiencies such as this lack of available information and absent regulatory oversight that safety board investigators said led to the Texas ammonium nitrate blast.

“(The Texas explosion) resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it,” said Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman of the Chemical Safety Board, in his April 22 statement.

ABC15 and AZCIR spent three months investigating how Arizona regulates hazardous chemical storage facilities and whether the necessary plans are in place to protect residents and businesses from a similar disaster. At the center of this investigation were efforts to identify Arizona facilities that manufacture and store ammonium nitrate and whether that information is accessible to the public.

Attempts to obtain a comprehensive list of Arizona fertilizer facilities through public records requests were denied by the Arizona Emergency Response Commission, the agency tasked with managing information about companies that store dangerous chemicals. The agency said it could not release the list because state and federal laws dictate that members of the public can only request information for specific facilities.

“We do have a responsibility to the public,” said Mark Howard, director of the Arizona Emergency Response Commission. “But we also have a responsibility to the security and the business itself.”

Howard said the commission adopted language from the federal law, which includes a section for public disclosure of information related to chemical facilities. It states that information about hazardous chemical company locations and the amounts of chemicals stored can only be released after requesting the information from a specific facility.

“I look at it more from a security standpoint that, really, I don’t want to make it any easier for the criminals and for the terrorists to have access to this information,” Howard said.