Campaigns and Projects

In 2024, the federal Environmental Protection Agency attempted to address the risk of chemical leaks through a rule called the Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention. It promised a modest course correction, requiring dangerous plants to investigate past accidents, plan for climate-fueled disasters, give workers more power to halt unsafe operations, and, in some cases, switch to safer chemicals or processes. But last month, Trump’s EPA proposed gutting most of those safeguards before they ever took effect, moving to strip away requirements for safer technologies, climate and natural disaster planning, third-party safety audits, and strong worker participation in decision making. “For fenceline communities and facility workers, this rollback is a declaration that our lives are deemed acceptable sacrifices,” said Ana Parras, executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, a group that has worked in several national coalitions around chemical safety.

A new analysis and interactive map illustrates the real-world impacts of gutting regulations for the nation’s most hazardous chemical facilities, as recently proposed by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Disaster Déjà Vu outlines six Texas facilities with recent histories of back-to-back chemical incidents – including fires, explosions, and worker injuries –  that are regulated by the EPA’s Risk Management Program (RMP). New requirements for RMP facilities, intended to make communities safer from the threat of chemical disasters, were finalized under the Biden Administration and were slated to begin going into effect this year, until President Trump’s EPA proposed rollbacks.  These rollbacks are “a capitulation to industry demands, at the expense of public safety,” concludes the analysis, co-authored by Coming Clean, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA), and Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (T.e.j.a.s.).

The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters published updates to its open-access chemical disaster tracking tool today that allow users to see how close they live to highly hazardous facilities covered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Risk Management Program (RMP). The Chemical Incident Tracker continues to allow users to search for chemical releases, fires and explosions that have been reported in the media since January 2021, using an interactive map. The tracker is updated with new incidents weekly. 

A coalition of environmental, labor and public safety groups are calling on US lawmakers to reject the Trump administration’s move to eliminate a federal unit that investigates chemical accidents, citing risks to more than 170 million people who lives in zones at risk for such events. In a July 17 letter to leaders in the US House and Senate, the coalition said the White House plan to eliminate the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) comes at a time when there have been at least 105 “serious chemical disasters” reported so far this year.

A coalition led by environmental justice organizations filed a suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today for refusing to issue long-overdue rules to prevent hazardous-substance discharges that threaten public health and contaminate waterways. Across the United States, more than 100,000 facilities make, store, or use hundreds of hazardous chemicals linked to reproductive, developmental, and neurological harm – including benzene, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, hydrogen cyanide, and hydrochloric acid. “For generations environmental justice communities have lived next to some of the most hazardous facilities in the country that threaten the bodies of water our families rely on to survive. Now more than ever we must prioritize creating safe and healthy places where all of our children can thrive and grow.” said Michele Roberts, National Coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform. “The EPA’s do-nothing approach leaves us one incident away from a catastrophe.”