U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board

But I first wanted to start by giving everyone an update if they haven't seen it.

In August of 2026, so just last month, the Chemical Safety Board came out with an update on that, and I, I think it's real applicable today, so I was gonna jump into that whenever you're ready.

Yeah, I think maybe to kick this off, maybe just a quick introduction of yourself.

We've had Travis on in a previous episode, but for those that maybe are just listening to this, could you just give a, a very brief, uh, description of yourself, kinda what you do? You kind of already hit it, but kinda just give us a little background of yourself before we jump in.

But I want to jump right into the tank part of this.

So on the graph right now, I'm showing a red line...

This is from the Chemical Safety Board update in August of 2026, and I'm showing data, historic kind of data, that is for the wall thickness of the tank that failed.

So the blue line is showing the design thickness of the tank, and as you go from shell course one all the way up to the top, the metal can get thinner, which o- it, it makes sense when you think about the most of the head pressure's at the bottom of the tank.

Give me, uh, give me a rip from the headlines.

Hey, um, notes from a recent meeting by the Chemical Safety Board that was held in Washington, DC, um, in a, their regularly publicly scheduled business meeting in mid of, uh, middle of September.

They reported things are not going well when it comes to process safety as compared to previous years.

Uh, and quoting, "When you begin your meeting, 2026 has been particularly deadly in comparison to previous years." That means we're not heading in the right direction.

Um, that's why you're gonna see much higher, higher numbers.

In July, the US Chemical Safety Board found the fire started after a corroded sprinkler component failed, allowing water to come into contact with reactive chemicals.

For GPB News, I'm Pamela Kirkland.

Authorities believe they've made a breakthrough in a twenty-eight-year-old South Georgia murder case.

Globally, there've been, uh, articles released over the last few months out of the US where we've seen more chemical facility-related incidents occur.

I think it was The Washington Post did a, a review on the number of incidents being reported to the Chemical Safety Board, and have seen a significant increase in the number of incidents occurring.

So are we seeing more incidents because there's more incidents, or are we seeing more incidents because there's more facilities? And so-

Yeah

We looked at Biolab's history of incidents, the emergency response, and started asking, what exactly was inside that plume? By season two, some pieces of that answer were starting to emerge.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates major industrial chemical accidents, found Biolab was storing nearly 14 million pounds of oxidizers on site, more than double what they told Rockdale County they were storing.

Randy Garcia, a former Biolab engineer, described recurring problems inside the warehouse.

I mean, when you're holding that much TCCA, it's very corrosive.

And it's a hazardous waste site.

And also doing various, we'll just say... illegal things out there so now people are upset so this could be another reason why people don't want this here but i think there's some resistance with this and with this uh situation here where they're only worried about human pathways not really i'm not a big fan of that necessarily now chemical safety board now a couple years ago my old boss had one of my old bosses had texted me about specifically this situation.

And late last month, the Chemical Safety Board released a safety video on here.

And we're going to go and see what this is.

Hold on.