Exploding chemical plants and disappearing data

The latest Prairie Fire newsletter begins with a startling question: Do you live near a chemical facility that could put your community at risk? Under the Trump administration, the EPA has rolled back public access to information about hazardous chemical sites while proposing to weaken safety regulations designed to prevent accidents. Newsjunkie managing editor Peter Landau spoke with Prairie Fire editor Morgan Kriesel about the Garden Grove chemical emergency, the disappearance of EPA data tools, and the organizations stepping in to preserve information the public can no longer easily access.

To begin, your newsletter talks about the rollback of the EPA's Risk Management Program database. You actually used its mapping tool. Was it useful?

The mapping tool is offline now—they took it down in January 2025. What it used to let you do was type in your address, and the map would show you all the chemical facilities reporting to the EPA's Risk Management Program.

These were facilities handling the most hazardous chemicals at the highest volumes. It wasn't every chemical plant, just the ones considered most dangerous.

The map is gone now. What they do have is a portal where you can submit your address, and it will tell you whether you're near one of these facilities. So I submitted the address of a high school that was in the Garden Grove evacuation zone when that chemical facility was at risk of exploding.

Instead of instantly checking a map, you now have to wait for the EPA to get back to you. They responded the same day, but all they told me was, "You might be. You're probably in a danger zone."

That was it.

So, not very useful, I would say.

When you started researching the story, did you expect to find a direct connection between the chemical industry's lobbying requests and the EPA's actions under Lee Zeldin?

I didn't. I didn't know that a chemical-industry lobbying request had kind of kickstarted this whole thing.

Maybe I should have expected it. It makes sense based on everything else they've done.

You've discussed the Garden Grove chemical emergency in detail in the newsletter, but you also have a personal connection to the story. How close were you to it?

My grandmother lives in the evacuation zone. She was one of the nearly 50,000 residents in Garden Grove and surrounding parts of Orange County who had to leave.

She has some health issues and can't drive, so my family had to pick her up and bring her to my parents' house.

We were all constantly checking the news. I was refreshing the OC Register and Voice of OC trying to see whether the facility was going to explode. At one point, officials were basically saying, "It's going to explode or it's going to spill, and there's no other option."

At one point, my roommates and I had a live feed of the chemical plant up on our television, trying to see if we could catch the explosion live. You know, get a little entertainment out of a horrible situation.

Mostly, though, we were just dreading the possibility that it would poison the air around my grandmother's house.

But she's back now, I imagine?

Yeah, she is back.

They managed to prevent both an explosion and a spill, basically by a miracle. They found a crack that had already formed in the tank, which was releasing pressure.

So yeah, by a miracle, my grandmother's house was saved.

The Garden Grove facility wasn't considered dangerous enough to qualify for the Risk Management Program. That must have surprised you.

Definitely.

What's even more surprising is that the Washington tank that imploded in Longview—the one that killed 11 workers—wasn't part of the program either.

The EPA was tracking other tanks at that facility, but not the one that failed.

Apparently, 500,000 gallons of corrosive white liquor wasn't considered dangerous enough to qualify. Neither was the chemical involved in Garden Grove.

That's part of why environmental groups spent years lobbying for stronger protections, which led to the expanded rules under Biden in 2024. They were saying these safeguards weren't nearly strong enough and that there wasn't enough oversight.

Those groups argue that's why the United States experiences a chemical accident roughly every two and a half days.

And now even those regulations are under threat of being rolled back.

You noted in the newsletter that both the Garden Grove and Longview facilities had prior safety issues. How difficult was it to uncover that history once the EPA's public tools were removed?

I didn't uncover those histories myself. I was relying on reporting by local news outlets.

For the Longview implosion, Oregon Public Broadcasting found that information through Washington Department of Labor & Industries records and other workplace investigators.

For Garden Grove, the OC Register obtained records through California Public Records Act requests.

Both outlets found that the facilities had prior complaints, violations, and incidents involving the same chemicals that ultimately caused the emergencies.

If the federal database is gone, local and state records are often the next best place to look.

One of the recurring themes in Prairie Fire is that information isn't truly gone if people move quickly enough to save it. How did you discover that organizations had already preserved the EPA's Risk Management Program data?

I first learned about the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters through a Time magazine article. They were quoted in the piece, though the article didn't mention they had preserved the data.

Some of the other tools came from previous research I'd done. The Guardian had a piece a month or so ago about disappearing government data, and that led me down a rabbit hole.

The main preservation effort comes from Drexel University's Environmental Collaboratory and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance.

Most of these groups found ways to save the information long before the current administration started deleting things.

Were you surprised by how quickly groups like Drexel, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, and MuckRock stepped in to recreate public-access tools?

Not really.

The underlying data had already been preserved by the Data Liberation Project, which is run by MuckRock and Big Local News.

They started working on that years ago. The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters has been tracking incidents since 2021.

A lot of these preservation efforts actually trace back to Trump's first term, when people first became concerned about environmental and climate data disappearing.

So I wasn't surprised to find that these efforts were already underway.

Do you think these preservation efforts are a temporary stopgap, or are they becoming a permanent parallel infrastructure?

I hope they're becoming a permanent parallel infrastructure.

Researching this story reinforced something I've been thinking for a while: government data was never as comprehensive as we needed it to be.

Even if the old EPA map still existed, it wouldn't have shown the Garden Grove facility because it wasn't included in the program.

Some of these independent tools actually provide more information than the original government systems did.

So yes, I hope they continue even if all the government data comes back someday.

You've written a lot about disappearing government information. Is the loss of the RMP map different from other datasets that have vanished?

Not really.

To me, it fits with the broader deregulatory and industry-friendly agenda we're seeing.

It's not more shocking than the disappearance of health or public-safety data. That's all bad. That's all alarming.

This particular case makes sense in the same way a lot of things under this administration make sense—which is to say, it makes no sense at all.

One thing that's interesting about your newsletter is that, while chemical plants provide the hook, the story is really about information. At what point did you realize that?

That's actually how I approach most Prairie Fire stories.

I start with information availability and public access, then work backward toward the human story.

In this case, the exploding chemical facility became the obvious hook because it's immediate. People want to know if they live near something that could blow up.

But the information angle always comes first for me.

There always is a human story, isn't there?

Yeah.

You write that people can't participate in oversight if they don't know what's happening in their own communities. Why does this information matter to people who don't consider themselves environmental activists?

Because you could suddenly find yourself evacuating your loved ones.

Your grandmother's house could be in the path of destruction.

There are more than 11,000 facilities in the Risk Management Program alone, and they're everywhere—Texas, California, the East Coast.

Even if you're not an environmentalist, it's important to know what risks exist in your community.

At the end of the day, people want to know whether they're going to explode or not.

The newsletter highlights a number of independent groups preserving environmental and public-safety information. Did reporting this story leave you more optimistic or more pessimistic about the future of public knowledge?

I oscillate wildly between those two positions.

You know that Futurama spoof of M*A*S*H where the robot doctor has a switch that flips between irreverent and maudlin?

That's how I feel researching these stories.

The hopeful part is seeing all these coalitions and organizations—often volunteers, often people already working full-time jobs—who have spent decades researching chemical disasters and trying to prevent them.

They're stepping up even more now.

It's sad and frightening that we can't rely on the government to protect the public interest the way we should.

But there are still people who want to help, and who are helping.

So I guess it's the same glass—half full and half empty at the same time.

A lot of environmental reporting focuses on disasters after they happen. You seem more interested in systems that help people identify risks before they become disasters. Why?

Because it's better to be angry at a chemical plant that hasn't burst into flames than to be on fire.

If readers take away one lesson from your newsletter, what do you hope it is?

I hope they use the maps and tools these groups have preserved.

I hope they find the chemical plants in their communities and start asking questions.

Are these facilities complying with the 2024 Risk Management Program requirements? Are they complying with local regulations?

One useful thing the EPA email did tell me was that local governments often maintain emergency-preparedness information for facilities in their jurisdictions.

People should look at that information.

I hope readers become aware of the risks around them and feel empowered to hold facilities accountable.

And I hope they're inspired by the organizations doing this work.

Look around your own community. See what's happening. Get involved.