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An explosion and fire at the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas sent smoke plumes billowing into the sky on Tuesday, March 24. Police ordered several nearby neighborhoods to shelter-in-place. Thankfully, no one was killed this time.   

 
But catastrophes like this one will only become more common if Trump’s EPA is able to go through with its plan to roll back the safety requirements of the agency’s Risk Management Program (RMP) for the more than 12,5000 high risk facilities that store hazardous chemicals.  

Biden’s EPA announced the Safer Communities from Chemical Accident Prevention Rule in 2024, which strengthened RMP Rule protections by requiring facilities housing hazardous chemicals to:   

• Plan for extreme weather like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires   
• Assess whether they could be using safer chemicals and processes   
• Get independent safety audits after reporting a disaster   
• Involve workers in disaster protection
• Put backup measures into place in case the first line of defense fails
• Replace hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives
• Ensure that automatic shutoffs are easily accessible to employees  

There is a chemical accident that has harmed humans or the environment every other day in the United States according to the environmental health nonprofit Coming Clean. The group identified 825 fires, leaks, and other chemical incidents between January 2021 and October 2023.  

But now Trump’s EPA is trying to roll back these protections before the facilities have even completed them. They’ve opened a docket to submit feedback on these plans, which is why we’re asking our supporters to submit a public comment to overwhelm EPA with support for preserving these strong safety requirements. 

We created a Public Participation in Environmental Rulemaking tool with the Yale School of Environmental Justice that makes it easy to generate unique, substantive comments for Regulations.gov based on your own perspective. After you fill out your name and concern, this artificial intelligence comment generator will send you a copy of your comment to your email address as well as a copy to us to submit.  

Your comments can save these rules that protect workers, first responders, and other fence-line communities. 180 million people live within several miles of a plant covered by these rules.

The Trump administration has also taken down the RMP public data tool which informed communities and first responders of where hazardous facilities are located and which chemicals are in use. 

One in three American schoolchildren attends a school within the vulnerability zone of a hazardous facility. Let’s show EPA that we need to preserve the safety rules that protect these communities.