No safety for yooou
Why would anyone need regulations on dangerous chemicals? We all have sense enough to stay away from dangerous chemicals without any damn government bureaucrat telling us to, don’t we?
Early Wednesday morning, inside a chemical manufacturing complex just southeast of Beaumont, a building erupted in a ball of flames, injuring eight people and sending acrid smoke wafting over southeast Texas. The explosion and subsequent fires at the Texas Petroleum Chemicals (TPC) Group plant, located near a residential area in Port Neches, knocked out the windows and damaged roofs of surrounding homes. The day before Thanksgiving, residents within the four-mile radius of the plant were ordered to evacuate.
Ok…well…so don’t live four miles from a chemical plant then, right?
Fires burned throughout the weekend, and all but one was put out by Tuesday. The TPC plant, which has a long history of violating state and federal environmental laws, manufactures butadiene, a known human carcinogen that can cause blurred vision, nausea, unconsciousness, and respiratory paralysis. Officials also have warned that residents could be exposed to asbestos. “I just worry about what we’re breathing in,” one resident told the local ABC affiliate. Another resident told the TV station, “You don’t really realize how close you are to danger until something like that happens in your own backyard.”
And, bonus, once you do know you can’t leave (unless you’re renting) because who’s going to buy your house near the chemical explosion?
The EPA estimates that 177 million Americans live near high-risk facilities that store or use potentially dangerous chemicals. One in three children attend school in those areas, with particularly high concentrations of schools in vulnerable zones in the Houston and Beaumont-Port Arthur metro areas.
Despite the well-documented risks of living near these facilities, just before the latest Texas explosion, the Trump administration rolled back plant safety rules that could make people who live, work, and learn near such facilities safer.
But it would be bad to make people who live, work, and learn near such facilities safer, because then they would be dependent on the deep state instead of free and upstanding and riddled with cancer.
