Washington paper mills mum about chemical safety after Longview disaster

It’s been two weeks since Washington’s worst industrial accident in nearly a century. More than a half-million gallons of a caustic liquid known as white liquor flooded through the Nippon Dynawave pulp mill in Longview after a storage tank imploded. Eleven people were killed. As the investigations continue, KUOW’s environment reporter John Ryan has been looking into chemical safety at other Washington pulp mills.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: You found three other paper mills in Washington that use the same white liquor chemical stew that killed workers at the Nippon Dynawave mill. Tell us about them.

John Ryan: There are two other mills in Longview. There’s the Smurfit Westrock mill and the North Pacific Paper Company (NORPAC) mill. Then there’s one in Port Townsend called the Port Townsend Paper Company mill. I asked each mill how much white liquor they have, how they store it, and what, if any, safety measures they’ve taken in the wake of the Nippon Dynawave disaster. The Smurfit Westrock mill in Longview declined to comment. The NORPAC and the Port Townsend mills didn’t reply to my requests at all.

How concerned should people living near these mills be about the chemicals there?

The main risk is to workers inside these plants. Even this Nippon Dynawave disaster, the worst in nearly a century, had minimal, I would say, environmental impacts beyond the boundaries of the plant.

There were some fish killed in a ditch outside the Longview plant, but the vast majority of those fish killed were actually introduced or invasive species, so, kind of a small environmental benefit, if you will. But it is hard to say how much of a risk these above-ground tanks of white liquor pose because there’s little information about them.

They’re not very tightly regulated, unlike underground tanks and unlike containers of other types of hazardous materials. I spoke with Marissa Baker, a professor of occupational health and hygiene at the University of Washington:

“The federal or state agencies would not have kind of purview on inspecting, maintaining the tank. Is it structurally sound? Is it being cleaned as it should? That’s going to really fall on the employer.”

While these tanks aren’t tightly regulated, Baker makes the point that our state constitution does require every worker to have a safe workplace, and that was clearly not the case at Nippon Dynawave when multiple workers were killed on the job.

Wouldn’t people in communities like Port Townsend and Longview have the right to know what is being done to keep people and workers safe?

Well, these mills are private businesses, and generally what they do is private information. But when you’re dealing with large amounts of hazardous materials, federal law says the public does have a right to know what’s going on there and what’s being done to keep the community safe.

Once a year, these mills are required to disclose how much hazardous material they have on-hand and how they store it, and they’re supposed to make that information publicly available. You might think this would end up on a website somewhere that anybody could just search for and find, but that’s not the case.

You have to file a public records request to get this information. I did that with the counties and the state to get this information. This morning, Cowlitz County told me they found the records I requested, but they couldn’t send them to me yet. They’re giving the mills two weeks to seek a court order to prohibit disclosure of these records, and that’s even though the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act says those reports must be available to the public. Again, the public does have a right to know.

That Community Right-to-Know Act also requires the mills and local governments to have plans for what to do if they do have a hazardous material spill. The local emergency planning committees in the mill counties are having their first meetings since the Nippon Dynawave disaster coming up very soon. If people want to try to find out more in person, the emergency planning committee for Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties is meeting tomorrow [Thursday] afternoon. For Port Townsend, in Jefferson County, there’s a meeting in July.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.