The Trump administration has moved to rewrite rules designed to avoid disasters in thousands of chemical facilities throughout the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency presented a motion in a federal court on Thursday withdrawing security regulations, presented last year under former President Joe Biden. The rules, which entered into force in May, require that sites that handle dangerous chemicals adopt new safeguards, including explicit measures to prepare for storms, floods and other climate -related risks.
They also require some facilities to analyze their use of particularly dangerous chemicals and change to safer alternatives, as well as share more information with neighbors and emergency responders. In addition, facilities that have suffered previous accidents must also undergo independent audits.
President Trump’s EPA intends to rewrite these rules, the agency said in a presentation before the United States Court of Appeals for the Columbia district. That essentially makes Fuot a legal challenge launched last year by a group of Republican general lawyers, as well as the chemical industry, which argued that the rules imposed undue charges on companies with little security benefit.
The American Chemistry Council, a main group of the industry and participant in the legal challenge, did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Earthjustice, a non -profit law group that demanded the first Trump organization for more than 200 Times in support of the environmental rules, condemned the measure. “Chemical explosions force whole neighborhoods to evacuate. The first to respond have died running in disasters for which they were not warned, ”said Adam Kron, a lawyer for the defense organization. “Workers have suffered burns, pulmonary damage and worse, all because companies cut corners to save money.”
The measure occurs when the Trump administration has embarked on a broad dismantling of climate and environmental policy throughout the federal government. The EPA did not detail in its presentation of the details of its planned rewriting, and Molly Vaselu, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the agency would not have comments beyond the presentation. While the rule entered into force last May, some requirements had to graduate in more than several years, which means that some of the practices that require could not be in place.
In a letter sent to the agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, in January, industry groups, including American Chemistry Council, requested a reconsideration of many of the main components of the rules. “The facilities affected by this program are vital components of the US economy, supporting millions of jobs, promoting innovation and maintaining our global competitiveness,” the groups said. “It is imperative for EPA to take immediate measures to fix critical areas of this rule.”
They also asked the agency to immediately close a public data tool that had allowed communities to look for details of local sites that store hazardous chemicals, including information about past accidents.
The planned rewriting is the last in a prolonged policy struggle about strengthening what is known as the Risk Management Program. In introduced for the first time in 1996, the RMP regulates almost 12,000 facilities that handle hazardous chemicals, including factories, wholesalers, oil refineries, natural gas plants, wastewater treatment plants and fertilizer distributors.
Many of these facilities are critical infrastructure, but also a risk to nearby communities, storing large amounts of highly dangerous substances such as chlorine, anhydrous ammonia and vinyl chloride.
More than 130 million people live within three miles of sites that handle hazardous chemicals that were covered by the Biden era, the EPA has estimated. A 2020 Congress Research Service report said that an accident of “worse cases” in any of the 2,000 of the most dangerous sites could endanger 100,000 people or more.
Former President Barack Obama tried to strengthen the rules after a 2013 mortal explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas killed 15 people and wounded more than 160. Trump’s first administration stopped the toughest requirements before they came into force. President Biden then reintroduced stricter rules in 2021 and ended last year.
