This was the headline in our local news after a chemical company failed to participate in a community meeting after their product leaked from a railcar sitting in a railyard about 4 miles from the plant. It took several days to get folks back into their homes; as you can imagine, they were unhappy. However, not attending a community meeting after an event tied directly to your chemical is hard to grasp. On top of that, the incident was in NO WAY their fault, so they had little to do with the direct causes of the event.
NOTE: the event was tied to a failed inhibitor in a Styrene shipment. We still do not know if the inhibitor failed or if someone exceeded the inhibitor’s lifespan. The railroad involved has stated that they will no longer hold Styrene cars in their yard and that the styrene cars must be delivered directly to the facility. This indicates to me that the railcar may have sat in that yard for an extended period of time. Much like the 2005 Cincinnati Styrene Railcar event.
At the community meeting, the railroad stated they “kept the railcar and others attached to it at the railyard because [the facility] didn’t have room for them at their site next to the Ohio River, according to the railroad.”
The headline above was from October 1, 2024, and then on October 31, 2024, the business announced it was closing the facility that was involved in the Styrene event. They claimed market conditions and competitiveness, but one wonders if the event was a tipping point. In today’s world, many of these facilities are set up as their own business entity, P&L center, and with the market conditions coupled with the lawsuits and regulatory fallout, the event may have been the final nail in the coffin for this facility, which is very sad for the hundreds of workers at the facility. The plant is planned to be shut down by April 1, 2025. The community has already disbanded its police force to prepare for the $500-700K loss in revenue from this closure.
It is my cynical belief that Sr. Management was well aware of the impending shutdown and thus decided they had nothing to gain by attending the community meeting and a lot more to lose.