Tianjin Tragedy: A Painful Lesson

Last Wednesday, Aug. 12, people living near the coast of Bohai Bay, in the southeast part of the port city of Tianjin, were awaked by the sound of sirens and the flickering of a fire.  A chemical warehouse on the bay was ablaze, and several residents got out their smartphones and videoed the impressive conflagration as it illuminated nearby apartment and office buildings.  At 11:30 PM, eyewitnesses saw a blinding flash as a huge detonation went off, followed a few seconds later by an even bigger one that registered 2.3 on the Richter scale of seismographs many miles away.  Acres of new cars awaiting shipments were incinerated, huge shipping containers were tossed around like matchsticks, and

as of this writing (Sunday Aug. 16), the confirmed death toll from the explosions has reached 112, with 90 more reported missing.  Hundreds have been injured, many seriously, and evacuations and property damage have rendered several thousand residents temporarily homeless.  Sodium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical, has been detected in the port's sewer system and the sewage outflow leading to Bohai Bay has been cut off. 

At this point, there are more questions than answers, as reporters who attended a news conference called after the tragedy learned before officials abruptly ended the conference.  Why was such a dangerous collection of chemicals stored within 2,000 feet of a residential area?  What was in the warehouse that exploded?  And last but not least, how can such a tragedy be prevented from happening again?

A chemical fire is one of the firefighter's worst nightmares, even when the nature of the chemicals is known.  The warehouse that exploded was owned by the Rui Hai International Logistics Company, which was unable to provide officials with a complete inventory of what was in the building when it caught fire.  Records indicated that the firm had a license to store calcium carbide, which produces highly flammable acetylene gas when it gets wet.  And sodium cyanide is not something you want to spread around either—an amount the size of a single small pill can kill you.  If there is enough left of the warehouse and its records to investigate, we will probably find out that there was a lot of something—ammonium nitrate, perhaps—stored in one big pile that went off all at once.  Sadly, many of the fatalities were in the ranks of the first responders who approached the warehouse with fire hoses after the first alarm was turned in.  Some of their bodies may never be recovered.

Years ago, in the late 1980s, I visited Tianjin during a trip related to my research activities.  My first impression of the city came as we emerged from an underground railway station into a square which was dominated by a strange assortment of suspended wires that I recognized immediately as a shortwave transmitting antenna.  This was back when shortwave radio was one of the main ways that people in totalitarian countries could get news that wasn't controlled by the government.  Accordingly, the government erected local shortwave jamming stations that tried to cover up Voice of America broadcasts with racket that sounded like a battle between two buzz saws.  Control of outside information is a lot harder nowadays because of the Internet, and the government of China has quit trying to suppress undesirable information completely, as the aborted news conference proves.  But just knowing how awful an accident is doesn't guarantee that something will be done about it.  Can we expect this horrific disaster to lead to any improvements in safety?  That depends.

One thing that is clear beyond a doubt:  people all over China and the rest of the world know how bad this explosion was.  And at a minimum, the residents of Tianjin are going to demand changes in the way the port operates and keeps track of hazardous materials.  Sometimes local politics in China is a lot more quasi-democratic than you would expect from a nominally totalitarian government system, in that incompetent heads roll and genuine reforms can take place if public pressure is great enough. 

The larger question is whether the Tianjin explosion will create a drive toward safer operation of industrial facilities in general across China.  The pollution problems in Chinese cities are notorious, with one expert estimating that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.  Lacking a formal means of influencing their government through meaningful elections, the Chinese people have taken to mounting lots of protests, and one Chinese Communist Party official estimated that in 2012 alone, about 50,000 environmental protests took place.  This is evidence of a great deal of frustration on the part of the country's citizens, who have enjoyed tremendous economic growth in the past few decades, but have paid the price by living in overcrowded, polluted, and increasingly dangerous cities.

There isn't much that is nice about a totalitarian government, but you can say this—once the people in power make up their minds to do something, they can go ahead and do it without a lot of compromises and political bargaining.  If Beijing wants to enact much stricter regulations about the types of chemicals stored in port warehouses such as Rui Hai's, they can do so tomorrow.  But regulations alone aren't enough.

Tragedies similar to the Tianjin explosions here in the U. S., such as the fertilizer-plant explosion in West, Texas in April of 2013, have emphasized how important it is for accurate inventory information to be available at all times to first responders, who in turn need to be educated about the various dangers and appropriate techniques that should be applied in case of a chemical fire.  Ideally, the Rui Hai warehouse would have been constructed and equipped with sprinkler and alarm systems so that it wouldn't have caught fire in the first place, or at least the fire could have been extinguished before it got out of control.  But despite the best precautions, chemical fires sometimes get out of hand.  In that case, fire departments need to know when to try to fight a fire, what to fight it with, and when to look at the online inventory and decide, "Let's issue an evacuation order and clear out ourselves too—this is too dangerous."  But there has to be an accurate online inventory and first responders who are trained to know what to do and when to do it.

These things are not rocket science, but they represent a change in the way people do things.  Let's hope that not only in Tianjin, but all across China, the sad lessons of last week's explosions lead to safer ports and better information exchange in the future. 

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the disaster carried by CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/15/asia/china-tianjin-explosions/, the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/world/asia/rising-anger-but-few-answers-after-explosions-in-tianjin.html, NBC News at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tianjin-china-explosion-area-evacuated-over-sodium-cyanide-fears-n410371, and the Wikipedia articles on "Tianjin explosions" and "Environmental issues in China."

What We Don't Know About Chemical Accidents

The fertilizer-plant explosion last April 17 in West, Texas that killed 15 and demolished a good part of the town was only the most recent of a number of accidents involving hazardous chemicals that have happened in Texas over the years.  Home to a large number of refining and petrochemical plants and other high-tech industries, Texas has had more of its share of explosions, fires, releases of toxic and polluting chemicals, and other chemical-related accidents.  But when a team of Dallas Morning News reporters tried to answer what they thought was a simple, straightforward question about the frequency of chemical accidents, they found a mare's nest of conflicting and incomplete statistics.  Is this a basic problem that leads to a higher rate of accidents than we would otherwise have?  Or is it just an inherent difficulty that comes about because of the nature of chemical accidents?

The News reporters were unable to find a single database of national scope that answered the question they were asking.  I think what they wanted to find was something like what the U. S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) maintains on statistics such as cases of measles or rabies, or the National Transportation Safety Board's database on fatal accidents involving air transport.  But what they found instead was a hodgepodge of things:  raw unfiltered lists of emergency calls to the U. S. Coast Guard, lists of incidents investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and data collected by the Chemical Safety Board, which relies primarily on media reports—in other words, the reporters themselves!  They found glaring inconsistencies among the numbers cited by the various sources of information, and although they were able to identify 24 potentially serious chemical accidents in Texas between 2008 and 2011, they were almost sure that the true number was higher.

The first question in compiling statistics on something is to define exactly what you are compiling statistics on.  The problem of defining a chemical accident is not a trivial one.  Clearly, if I'm working in my garage and accidentally knock over a can of used oil that spills into the ground, that is not something that should be treated with the same seriousness as the West explosion.  But by some definitions, both are chemical accidents.  So first, a line needs to be drawn defining how serious an accident should be before it is logged into a database.  But how do you draw that line?  Should you log only accidents that resulted in casualties (deaths or injury to persons), or a minimum amount of property damage, or all accidents that involve certain types of particularly hazardous chemicals?  There are millions of kinds of chemicals, and the hazard to humans of many of them are simply unknown. 

Even if we agree that casualty-only accidents are what we want, the problems of privacy and legal liability come into play. As noted by the Dallas Morning News reporters, private firms are reluctant to share details of their inner workings that might leave them open to lawsuits or might prove repellent to potential investors.  As the aftermath of the West explosion has shown, the legal environment of chemical accidents is complex, poorly defined, and is the result of a tangle of criminal, regulatory, and civil codes that do not produce the kind of clear-cut situations that are easy to record in databases.

Not mentioned by the investigative reporters is a powerful external force on chemical industries which makes most firms maintain and enforce strict internal safety rules and records of accidents.  This force is applied by insurance companies.  My brother-in-law is the chief safety officer for a large firm that operates refineries in several states.  One of his main jobs is to travel to the home offices of the company's main insurers annually, and present detailed reports of his firm's safety records and the measures they are taking to make sure lessons are learned from near-misses in order to prevent bigger accidents in the future.  While these matters are handled out of the public eye, the desire to keep insured is one reason that the chemical industry as a whole has a safety record that is much better than it could be, considering the millions of pounds of hazardous material that passes through its facilities every year.  And in conversations with my brother-in-law, I have learned that firms quickly learn about accidents at other firms, and take steps to make sure those types of incidents don't happen to them too.  In other words, a good bit of what a comprehensive nationwide database of chemical accident reports would do, is already taking place: namely, information-sharing among the plant operators themselves.

Of course, there are always exceptions, which often tend to be among the smaller independent operators that can't afford full-time safety officers and large staffs.  The West fertilizer plant was one such operation, but it is not clear that having an accurate national database of fertilizer-plant explosions would have made much difference in the way that particular accident transpired. 

More and better publicly accessible information about chemical accidents is a desirable thing, and I hope that the West explosion will lead to a better system of gathering and presenting such data nationwide.  But if this goal is achieved at the cost of burdensome, onerous, and unjustly harsh regulations of industries which already do a fairly good job of self-policing due to the economic interests of their insurers, the price tag may be more than we should pay.

Sources: The Dallas Morning News report appeared on that paper's website on Aug. 24-25 at http://www.dallasnews.com/news/west-explosion/headlines/20130824-after-west-disaster-news-study-finds-u.s.-chemical-safety-data-wrong-about-90-percent.ece.