This op-ed was originally published by The Regulatory Review. Click to read the full text.
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed after it was struck by a container ship, six construction workers were killed. According to estimates made at the time, the state of Maryland could lose up to $15 million a day in revenue as containers are routed to rival ports. The cost of replacing the bridge, a process that will take years, is expected to exceed $1.5 billion.
The Key Bridge collapse was avoidable. In 1991, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials issued a guide for designing over-water bridges “to minimize their susceptibility to damage from vessel collisions.” The guide recommended that bridges built before 1991 undergo vulnerability assessments to identify and respond to the risk of a catastrophic collapse from a vessel collision, even though federal law only requires such assessments for bridges built later.
The Maryland Transportation Authority never conducted a vulnerability assessment on the Key Bridge. After the collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that if the state agency had conducted one, it would have found that the bridge’s risk level was almost 30 times greater than the Association’s risk threshold for critical or essential bridges.
The vulnerability assessment that might have averted the Key Bridge tragedy is a form of risk assessment. Risk assessment is the process of deciding how dangerous the subject of an evaluation is. If a risk assessment indicates that something poses unacceptably high risks, the public or private entity conducting the assessment can identify and select among available options to reduce the risk. Risk assessment alleviates ignorance, and ignorance of the kind that preceded the Key Bridge collapse is most decidedly not bliss. What we do not know can hurt us.
Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970. One goal of the federal Clean Air Act, enacted that year, is “to initiate and accelerate a national research and development program to achieve the prevention and control of air pollution.” Congress later recognized that the manufacturing, distribution, use, or disposal of some chemical substances “may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” It therefore endorsed a national policy that “adequate information should be developed with respect to the effect of chemical substances and mixtures on health and the environment.”
Over the years, Congress delegated to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority and responsibility to fill in the gaps in our understanding of the health risks posed by human interactions with the environment and to adopt and enforce regulations to reduce any risks EPA deemed unacceptable.
For much of its 55-year existence, EPA has performed those tasks admirably. Through its own research, research it has funded through grants to university and private institutions, and the mandates it has imposed on risk-creating businesses, EPA has accumulated a trove of information that has allowed it to identify and respond to some of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. Notwithstanding those efforts, scientific uncertainty continues to characterize many environmental issues.
Tragically, today’s EPA, under the leadership of Administrator Lee Zeldin and at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, no longer seems interested in fortifying the information infrastructure needed to understand environmental problems and enable the agency to address public health or environmental risks effectively. With remarkable speed, EPA has undercut its own ability, and the ability of scientific experts outside the agency, to provide the information needed to support risk-reducing activity by the government or the private sector. Indeed, EPA seems determined to squelch any efforts to generate information about environmental risks and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of anyone else’s risk assessment endeavors.
