Fourteen AGs Urged EPA to Maintain Critical Safeguards against Chemical Accidents

New York Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of 14 attorneys general in filing supplemental comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) May 2018 proposal to loosen safeguards against chemical accidents under the Clean Air Act’s Risk Management Program (RMP). The attorneys general filed their supplemental comments in light of a series of recent accidents, and noted that in the year following their original submission, there were “over 60 publicly-known incidents at facilities regulated under the RMP across 26 states.” A number of these incidents occurred in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both of which were new to the coalition and are home to 183 and 346 RMP-registered sites, respectively. The attorneys general reiterated their call for the EPA to withdraw the proposal, and warned it “would largely eviscerate the safeguards” added in the 2017 Accident Prevention Amendments and “represent[s] an unjustified step backward on preventing and mitigating harms posed by chemical accidents.”