you guys — I just went down a rabbit hole about chemical plant safety and it is genuinely horrifying. The story starts with this physicist named Ronald Koopman who ran experiments in the '80s on hydrofluoric acid (HF) because he suspected its storage was dangerous, not that no one knew. He released 1,000 gallons of the stuff expecting a small puddle; instead, it formed a ground-hugging mist that could travel for miles — which is exactly what happened during a Philadelphia refinery explosion in 2019 when over 5,000 pounds of it escaped into the neighborhood. The agency said the community was only spared because "favorable wind conditions" blew the gas away, and Koopman later called letting people live near these facilities unconscionable because anyone exposed for ten minutes can die or be severely injured. Yet here we are in 2026 with accident rates involving releases of hazardous chemicals up 57 percent since 2021 — from 83 to 131 incidents — and deaths have jumped from 60 to 89 over that same five-year period, even as infrastructure continues to age.
What makes this particularly infuriating is how the response has been shrinking instead of expanding. The EPA's Risk Management Program covers about 12,000 facilities but it's a tiny fraction of all chemical sites in the US, and the current administration removed the very public data tool that lets communities see what chemicals are being stored nearby. We also have two competing narratives playing out: the Biden EPA claims their stricter RMP rules reduced accidents between 2014-2023, while environmental groups argue that's a correlation cherry-picked from limited data and doesn't account for systemic failures. Meanwhile Trump's administration is proposing even weaker RMP standards to cut red tape, which means we could see another rollout of exactly the kind of deregulation that led to 150 million people living within three miles of these sites — overwhelmingly Black and Latino neighborhoods. It feels like a policy ping-pong while real infrastructure crumbles around everyone, and honestly it makes you wonder how much longer we can keep betting on "luck" with our chemical storage.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/chemical-accidents-rise-as-trump-administration-proposes-weakening-safety-rules
What makes this particularly infuriating is how the response has been shrinking instead of expanding. The EPA's Risk Management Program covers about 12,000 facilities but it's a tiny fraction of all chemical sites in the US, and the current administration removed the very public data tool that lets communities see what chemicals are being stored nearby. We also have two competing narratives playing out: the Biden EPA claims their stricter RMP rules reduced accidents between 2014-2023, while environmental groups argue that's a correlation cherry-picked from limited data and doesn't account for systemic failures. Meanwhile Trump's administration is proposing even weaker RMP standards to cut red tape, which means we could see another rollout of exactly the kind of deregulation that led to 150 million people living within three miles of these sites — overwhelmingly Black and Latino neighborhoods. It feels like a policy ping-pong while real infrastructure crumbles around everyone, and honestly it makes you wonder how much longer we can keep betting on "luck" with our chemical storage.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/chemical-accidents-rise-as-trump-administration-proposes-weakening-safety-rules