Nov 29, 2006 7:00 am US/Eastern
Report: Danvers Plant Not Inspected In 4 Years
DANVERS (AP) ―
The Danvers chemical plant that exploded a week ago, damaging nearby homes and businesses and causing about 200 people to evacuate, was not inspected by environmental regulators because it was too small to be a priority, according to a published report.
State and federal governments routinely focus their efforts on larger facilities because they are the biggest potential polluters, The Boston Globe reported. But a new state agreement with federal regulators will allow officials to divert some of the required inspections to smaller plants, which may pose a larger combined hazard because there are so many of them.
Arleen O'Donnell, acting commissioner for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the Danvers explosion has added new urgency to the plan approved in September.
"We don't know what caused this accident...but it will raise awareness of these small facilities," she told the Globe. "We are going to look more closely at facilities that produce small quantities of waste but may pose significant risks."
Neither the EPA nor the DEP ever inspected the Danvers facility, the Globe reported.
The Danvers Fire Department last inspected it in 2002, according to department records, and found no violations. But the department doesn't perform a detailed fire-safety evaluation of manufacturers using chemicals except to be sure they are stored away from ignition sources, said Deputy Fire Chief Kevin Farrell.
"We are not chemists," he told the Globe. "I don't believe there's anything we could have done to prevent this." He said the companies occupying the plant, ink maker CAI Inc. and paints manufacturer Arnel Co. Inc., had properly filed annual disclosures of hazardous chemicals at the site.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspected the plant in 1990 but found no violations, a spokesman said.
The state fire marshal's office has never inspected the plant, according to its records, and a spokeswoman for that agency said there is no requirement to do so unless there is a special request from a local fire department.
About 15,000 companies in Massachusetts produce small amounts of hazardous waste, and fewer than 2 percent are inspected annually, a DEP official said.
"And we want to change that," said Steven DeGabriele, director of the DEP's business compliance division.
The EPA requires most states to do annual inspections of 20 percent of the companies that produce more than five 55-gallon drums of hazardous waste per month. There are about 400 such companies in Massachusetts. Companies that produce less are not subject to routine inspections.
Last September, Massachusetts reached a first-in-the-nation agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency to give state officials, who are authorized to enforce federal hazardous waste laws, more flexibility to inspect smaller facilities and skip a few of the larger ones.
State officials sought the agreement after discovering that only about nine percent of large waste generators had serious environmental violations, while about 13 percent of the smaller ones did.
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