That apparently self-reporting is just another way of saying “dangerous cuts”:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate – which can also be used in bomb making – unaware of any danger there.
Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren’t shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.
A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory gridlock may have contributed to the disaster.
“It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. “This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.”
Company officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment on its handling of chemicals and reporting practices. Late on Friday, plant owner Donald Adair released a general statement expressing sorrow over the incident but saying West Fertilizer would have little further comment while it cooperated with investigators to try to determine what happened.
(h/t Thomas Soldan.)
Self-reporting like self-deportation is how the free market Capitalists want our government to work. Which is without money to fund any agency that might interfer with their profit making. If that means that we the people get sick or killed, well “too bad, so sad.” You gotta love the Capitalist economic system.
Self-reporting doesn’t work? Who could have foreseen that?? Corporate assholes behave like corporate assholes? I never would have imagined. You better fucking believe you have the right to own all the guns you can lay your hands on, but you’re a communist if you want oversight of the bomb factory next door.
Funny thing about that self reporting, we can’t be trusted. Our employers and banks all report our income to the IRS.
let me fix the end for you: “while it cooperated with investigators to cover up any criminal or civil liability.”
Real nice zoning going on there. Awesome!
Something is rotten in Texas — maybe the whole country?
Surely the IRS knew about this ammonia plant. is there no lateral info to the DHS? Sheesh.