The Georgia Chemical Disaster Is a Warning
6 min read
Since September 29, when the smell of chlorine first began to waft over metro Atlanta, Georgia residents’ lives have been upended by an enormous chemical fire. That day, a chemical plant containing millions of pounds of pool sanitizer burned to the ground in Conyers, Georgia. The blaze was extinguished in hours, but an enormous plume of orange and black smoke remained for days, so thick that drivers on Interstate 20 struggled to see past their windshield. Authorities ordered 17,000 people to evacuate and more than 90,000 to shelter in place for the first 48 hours. For those nearest the plant, the order lasted 19 days. The county’s public schools reopened on October 21 after weeks of virtual learning. Local doctors say they’re seeing children with sore throats, burning eyes, and unyielding headaches. Elaine Fontaine-Kpargarhai, a real-estate agent in Conyers, told me that her 6-year-old daughter had four asthma attacks in three days after not needing her inhaler for half a year.
The smoke has mostly cleared, but residents say they still smell and taste chlorine in the air. Officials in Rockdale County, where the fire broke out, have filed a federal lawsuit against BioLab, the company that owns the chemical plant, for negligence. “We are aware of the filing, and we are reviewing it thoroughly and will respond accordingly,” a BioLab spokesperson told me in a statement. “We are not in a position to comment further at this time, other than to say that our goal has been, and continues to be, to work constructively with the County.”
Georgia’s initial response to the fire was limited by Hurricane Helene, which smacked into Florida’s Gulf Coast before it killed more than 200 people, including 33 in Georgia; downed trees and power lines in Rockdale County; and kept state emergency crews busy with rescues. Helene may not have triggered the explosion—officials, who are still investigating the cause of the fire, have suggested that a malfunctioning sprinkler is to blame—but it certainly complicated the response. Such a collision of natural and chemical disasters may become only more common as the world warms, leaving people who live near facilities like the one in Conyers vulnerable to uncertain health effects and worse.
Conyers, roughly a 45-minute drive from Atlanta, is not even close to the Gulf of Mexico, where Helene formed. The worst of the storm’s damage came even farther inland, near Asheville, North Carolina—demonstrating the long reach of such disasters. Things could have been much worse in the areas closer to where the hurricane peaked. The Gulf Coast is the backbone of U.S. chemical manufacturing. Texas and Louisiana are home to facilities that supply 80 percent of American petrochemicals. Alabama stuffs more than 25 manufacturers into its 60-mile “Chemical Corridor,” where factories make products such as synthetic rubber. Chemical plants along Florida’s west coast supply the state’s boat and spa factories.
Manufacturing, storing, and mixing chemicals require precise environmental control. “Chemical processes depend on things being in range,” Mike Mastrangelo, a health-care emergency planner in the Galveston, Texas, area, told me. That can mean maintaining the right pressure, temperature, or humidity to keep a chemical stable. For example, TCCA—a white, powdery substance used as a pool sanitizer and currently believed to be at the root of the BioLab fire—is stable when fully dry or fully submerged in water. But if it gets wet and can’t fully dissolve, it explodes into a cloud of toxic chlorine gas.
Extreme weather threatens the ability of chemical plants to maintain those delicate conditions. Floodwaters can turn over storage tanks, burst pipes, and make drainage systems spew waste, so loose chemicals mix and catch fire. Hurricane-force winds can disable power grids and, consequently, HVAC systems. In 2017, flooding from Hurricane Harvey knocked out the power supply for a plant outside Houston that produced temperature-sensitive peroxides. The chemicals overheated and self-ignited, releasing toxic peroxide fumes and forcing 200 people to evacuate. In 2020, Hurricane Laura ripped the roof off buildings in a Louisiana plant also owned by BioLab. Rain dripped onto the TCCA, causing a chlorine explosion. A federal investigation concluded that BioLab had been “unprepared for the winds produced” and had a “largely nonfunctional fire protection system.” (The BioLab spokesperson told me that the 2020 incident stemmed from Hurricane Laura’s “unprecedented impact,” but he did not address questions about the safety issues raised by the investigation. He also directed me toward a recent press release announcing the “successful completion of emergency response operations” at the Conyers facility.)
Chemical plants across the United States are concentrated near ports, which makes shipping cheaper but raises the risk of many disasters that climate change makes worse, such as hurricane storm surge. A 2022 investigation of more than 10,000 facilities that use high-risk chemicals, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, found that one in three was located in an area where flooding, storms, or wildfires are especially likely. Flooding was by far the biggest concern. At least 133 chemical plants are already at risk of flooding at high tide, and hundreds more are in areas that “may be inundated by storm surge” in a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, according to the report. Furthermore, experts predict that sea levels along the Gulf will be 14 to 18 inches higher by 2050, adding to the problem.
The EPA holds some of these at-risk facilities—those that contain any of 258 chemicals that are inherently toxic or flammable—to a higher safety standard. The companies must work with local responders to make detailed emergency plans, consider how climate change affects the vulnerability of their facilities, and, upon request, inform residents in a six-mile radius what hazardous chemicals they live near. But the EPA does not have special disaster-preparedness requirements for reactive chemicals—compounds that are safe until they suddenly aren’t, including TCCA, which has caused multiple chemical disasters. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, a federal watchdog that advises rule-making, has documented more than 170 serious accidents caused by reactives—resulting in more than 100 deaths—that took place from 1980 to 2020. Chemical companies have little incentive to shore up their defenses against natural disasters at facilities with reactive substances, James Elliott, a co-director of Rice University’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience, told me. That leaves those sites especially vulnerable to extreme weather—and dangerous to the communities that surround them. (The EPA told me in a statement that it plans to evaluate potential additions to its list of regulated substances, but that any changes will be a multiyear process.)
Some vulnerable towns are already preparing for a future in which chemical disasters are more common. In Galveston, Texas, a coastal city full of refineries, a mascot named Wally the Turtle regularly teaches schoolchildren about the risk of chemical disasters, Mastrangelo told me. He runs chemical-disaster drills at hospitals in the area. But, Mastrangelo said, his county is an outlier—many more communities are worryingly unprepared, even in areas that are clearly at high risk of a natural disaster triggering a chemical one.
About 40 percent of Americans live within three miles of a facility that’s subject to the EPA’s higher safety standard. Many more likely live near a plant with reactive chemicals. (This interactive, county-by-county map tracks facilities with chemicals that pose a risk to human health.) Not all of those facilities are along the Gulf Coast or in places that have historically been subject to hurricanes, wildfires, severe heat waves, and the like. But this past summer showed that nowhere in the U.S. is safe from extreme weather—and that any community near a chemical facility is at risk of suffering two disasters at once.
