Last week, CPR’s Tom McGarity had a column in the Christian Science Monitor, describing the ways that the political right’s war on regulation and enforcement helped contribute to the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion last month. Today, he’s got a separate piece in the Dallas Morning News (and this past Friday, it was in the Houston Chronicle) taking a look at the Texas legislature’s response to the disaster.
In the piece, McGarity takes a state legislator to task for declaring — even while the investigation into the West disaster is still ongoing — that “‘the state of Texas is in good shape’ when it comes to regulatory programs designed to protect its residents from future explosions. Therefore, he didn’t see the need for ‘any major changes.'”
McGarity notes that Texas doesn’t even have an occupational safety and health entity that might have inspected the plant. Had it, he writes, its concern for worker safety
would have alerted it to the risks posed by the ammonium nitrate. And the steps taken to reduce those risks would have protected the entire community of West, not just the workers. When it comes to protecting public health and safety from threats posed by unsafe fertilizer plants in rural areas and equally dangerous industrial operations in major cities, Texas politicians have adopted a Wild West attitude that gives Texas businesses great freedom to innovate and grow the economy. But the Legislature and the governor have been less concerned about ensuring that these companies exercise that freedom in a responsible manner and are held accountable when they don’t.
It’s well worth the read.
