After the two major, one of them deadly, chemical tank incidents of last week, the drumbeats continue to sound for increased regulation.  On Monday I covered the cultural differences between the two regions of the country.  On Tuesday I covered how one cry related to regulation was, at best, specious.  I have resisted to date speculating on the cause of these incidents.  There is simply not enough information publicly available for such comments to be other than pure speculation – at least on a technical level.  But given these drumbeats there is one aspect of causation that I think should be discussed.

Maintaining and operating tanks that contain hazardous materials is fundamental.  And not just fundamental in terms of environmental concerns.  It is fundamental in terms of operating the factory in question.  As I covered yesterday, regardless of any regulatory fines or jail time they may suffer, these plants are, in the wake of these incidents, suffering massive financial damage.  Long before word one of any regulation was ever contemplated, it was in the financial best interest of these factories to properly maintain and operate these tank and piping systems.  Before any regulation is considered, and especially before considering an expansion of regulation, the essential question is, “Why would these operations allow these tanks to get out of shape sufficiently for these incidents to occur?”

These types of plants all must have, by the very nature of their operations, production or facility engineers on staff whose job is to maintain and improve the operations of these systems.  The org charts and job titles from company to company may vary, but they all have people whose stated job is to keep these systems working and working safely.  So why did those people fail?

Given my forty years of working with companies like these to assist with environmental regulatory compliance the answer to these critical questions is simple.  These individuals, and the companies they work for, are distracted from performing their core function.  And those distractions are largely in the form of regulatory burden.  So onerous has the regulatory burden become that the people in these slots must spend more time on compliance activities, pulling permits, filing reports, recordkeeping in order to file the reports, hosting inspections and filing corrective actions from those inspections, than on operating the system proper.  Furthermore, due to these distractions they end up more expert in the regulations than in the operations.

As time has proceeded being more experts in regulation than operation has become more pronounce.  Environmental regulation began in earnest in the early 1970’s – about 50 years ago.  For the first 30 or so years, the regulatory agencies had to hire from industry as that was the only source of the expertise they needed.  Thus the agencies were staffed by people that intimately understood the operations of the systems they were regulating, and the requirements of the companies that were operating them.  But in recent decades that is no longer the case.  Now you can get a degree at a university in “environmental studies” (a major that includes only a smattering of engineering or more fundamental science like chemistry and physics) and go immediately to work for one of these agencies without ever having set foot in an actual manufacturing operation.  This effect was greatly exaggerated by covid and the advent of remote work.  Nowadays these agencies hire people that have never been to the office, let alone in a factory.  Increasingly, the regulatory agencies regulate without any real world context.

Sure the public comment phase of any regulatory action is supposed to allow for this real world context.  However, in my career I have seen entire industry organizations, designed specifically to push back on regulation, fall by the wayside as the regulators simply ignored their concerns because “something had  to be done.”

I won’t even get into the issue of conflicting regulation from multiple agencies battling over jurisdiction – this post is already too long.  The point is simple.  Burdensome regulation is deeply involved in the causation, not the prevention, of incidents like those we saw last week.  Said regulation serves as a distraction from the fundamental functioning of the facility in question – which of its very nature includes keeping these systems operating without incident.

Put directly, the best thing the government can do in response to these events is get out of the way.