The US Steel plant where two workers were killed and ten injured in an explosion on Monday had a history of chemical accidents — but it was one of hundreds of high-risk chemical facilities that were recently hidden from the public after demands from the chemical industry.
The Trump administration, at the behest of the powerful chemical lobby, has been working to gut oversight of so-called Risk Management Program facilities, chemical plants that are considered at the highest risk of deadly explosions. In April, two months after an explicit request from industry, Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scrubbed a tracking tool listing such facilities from its website.
Clairton Coke Works, the US Steel plant near Pittsburgh that erupted in black smoke on Monday, is one such facility. Deemed high risk by environmental regulators, the plant, which manufactures materials used in steel production, is subject to various risk management requirements under the Clean Air Act aimed at preventing chemical fires.
The plant has a history of chemical accidents involving ammonia, a reactive chemical, public records show. From 2017 to 2022, it received thirty-two formal enforcement actions from the EPA, according to the agency’s enforcement records, the most of any facility of its kind covered under Risk Management Program regulations during that time period.
That included “high-priority” violations of the Clean Air Act, the records indicate, which could relate to the release of pollutants or problematic chemical safety procedures. It’s unclear what led to these past violations or what caused Monday’s explosion.
As the Associated Press reported on Monday, the plant also had a history of workplace safety violations. There have been at least two other fatal incidents at the plant in recent years, including an explosion that killed a maintenance worker in 2009.
As President Trump’s environmental authorities loosen oversight of chemical safety, up-to-date information on the plant is now far more limited. Chemical facilities like the Pittsburgh plant may also be subject to far fewer risk management requirements if the chemical lobby gets its way.
“This isn’t US Steel Clairton Coke Works’ first incident,” Maya Nye, the federal policy director of Coming Clean, a chemical watchdog group, told the Lever. “Any time the same facility has repeated disasters, that’s a regulatory failure.”
Chemical accidents are more common than many realize. On average, according to Coming Clean, hazardous chemical incidents occur every other day at plants across the country. Within the last year, there have been at least two other fatal chemical accidents in the United States, including one in Nebraska in July that killed three people at a biofuels plant, and last November at a Kentucky plant that killed two workers.
In 1990, federal lawmakers enshrined new amendments to the Clean Air Act to help prevent such chemical disasters. This was the birth of the EPA’s Risk Management Program, which instituted new safety protections for the highest-risk chemical facilities.
These regulations have been vulnerable to political winds in Washington. They were strengthened under the Obama administration, then rolled back under the first Trump administration, and then again partially restored under President Joe Biden.
Within days of Trump’s inauguration, a litany of groups representing the chemical industry — many of which had donated generously to the president’s campaign — sent a letter to his new EPA chief, Lee Zeldin, requesting that he initiate a rulemaking to “correct” new safety provisions instated under the Biden administration, including new audit and disclosure requirements.
The chemical lobby also demanded that the Trump administration “immediately” take down a website, launched under Biden, that highlighted the locations of high-risk chemical facilities and provided information about their safety records. Chemical industry watchdogs had long pushed for the EPA to make this information more easily available to the public to provide much-needed transparency to communities living in the vicinity of dangerous chemical plants.
In March, Trump’s EPA announced it was initiating rollbacks to chemical safety regulations, and in April, the EPA scrubbed the chemical facility tracking tool from its website.
Since then, accidents at facilities that had been listed on the tracking tool have led to toxic chemical releases and mass evacuations.
Last month, the Trump administration announced it would ax the Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal watchdog that investigates chemical accidents.
The locations and enforcement records of high-risk chemical facilities remain public information — but it is now much more difficult to obtain this data. Members of the public must either submit a Freedom of Information Act request or visit a designated federal reading room in order to view the records. That means that up-to-date information about the safety record and other details of the Pennsylvania US Steel plant is not immediately available.
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