CSB Is Like a Dog with a Bone Investigating Safety Cases

He also pointed out that CSB released a new safety on fatal hydrogen chloride release at the Wacker Polysilicon facility in Charleston, Tennessee. The video, he said, gained over 230,000 views in six days. 

According to board member Sylvia Johnson Ph.D., the agency's renewed capabilities enable swift responses to incidents, and internal improvements help prevent future backlogs. 

She noted that rebuilding the CSB is more than recovery, it's reinvention. (See “End The Drama At The Chemical Safety And Hazard Investigation Board.”) 

“Executive Director Klejst detailed some of our lessons learned in process safety management, as well as the importance of the CSBs accidental release reporting rule, which is a powerful tool that will assist and guide us in our efforts. We demonstrated that the CSB is committed to asking the right questions, gathering the right data in learning the lessons of the risks that matter.”

Johnson spent five and a half years as an Occupational Epidemiologist in the Health and Safety Department for the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). In this role she conducted workplace hazard assessments and investigated incidents involving the death of workers due to either chemical, biological or physical exposures. She was appointed to the CSB board in 2022.

There is still plenty of work to be done. CSB board member Catherine Sandoval said that the agency receives approximately two reports per week of chemical and petrochemical incidents meeting the CSB’s reporting thresholds.

“If we had more resources, [certainly] we could deploy to many more incidents,” said Sandoval. “[But] part of what it tells us is that we all still have work to do collectively as a nation and at the CSB, to get to our goal of promoting chemical safety.”

Sandoval’s more than two decades of safety leadership includes investigating and responding to hydrocarbon incidents, root cause analysis, promoting process safety management, safety culture, and utility safety, reliability, equity and environmental sustainability. As a Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, she responded to major chemical incidents during her six-year term including the natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, and the methane plume at Aliso Canyon, the largest methane leak in America. She began her post at the CSB in 2023.

The CSB Remains Committed

“This year, we completely closed out six investigations. And when I say completely closed out, what that means is we closed all the recommendations associated with those investigations,” said Charles Barbee, director of recommendations at the CSB since August 2016. “And this is where I talk about the tenacity and professionalism of the recommendation staff. They have the memory of an elephant — they never forget. And if you look, one incident happened in 2001 back when we first started doing investigations as an agency. They're like dogs with a bone. They never let it go.”

The successful closure of these cases represented the implementation of 67 critical safety recommendations designed to protect workers, communities and the environment. 

“So if Executive Director [Stephen] Klejst or any member of the board or the public or anyone else wants to ask me if fiscal year 2024 was a good year for driving chemical safety excellence, I think I would have to say you're darn right it was.”

The CSB is an independent, nonregulatory federal agency that investigates the root causes of major chemical incidents.

Its mission is to drive chemical safety change through independent investigations to protect people and the environment. The agency was created under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

In the CSB’s 25-year history, the agency has deployed to over 170 chemical incidents and issued 1,000 recommendations that have led to numerous safety improvements across a wide variety of industries.