The Trump administration has transferred the rules designed to prevent disasters on thousands of chemical facilities across the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday filed a resolution in the federal court, which was produced under the former President Joe Biden last year. The rules that are effective in May require sites that handle dangerous chemicals to adopt new security measures, including clear measures to prepare for storms, floods and other climatic risks.
They also require some features to check their use of especially dangerous chemicals and switch to safe options -to share more information with neighbors and emergency respondents. In addition, the features that have faced pre -accidents will also have to undergo independent audit.
President Trump’s EPA intends to re -write those rules, the agency said in a filing with the United States Court of Appeals for Columbia district. This essentially gives the moot a legal challenge launched last year by a group of Republican Attorney-General, as well as the chemical industry, which argued that the rules improperly burdened companies with low security benefits.
The American Chemistry Council, a main industry group and a legal challenge, did not respond to the request of the comment immediately.
Earthjustice, a non -profit law group that sued the Trump organization over 200 ago The Times condemned the move in support of environmental rules. “Chemical explosions force the entire neighborhood to evacuate. Earlier the respondents have participated in the disasters that they were not warned about, ”said Adam Kron, a lawyer of the Advocacy Organization. “Workers burn, lung damage, and worse, for all, because companies cut corners to save money.”
This step comes when the Trump administration has adopted widespread disintegration of climate and environmental policy in the federal government. The EPA did not expand to record the nuances of its planned rewriting, and the agency spokesman Molly Waseliu said the agency would not have commented beyond the filing. While the rule was effective in last May, some requirements were to be phased out over many years, meaning that some practices required for it may not yet be in place.
In January, in a letter sent to the agency’s administrator, Li Zeldin, industry groups, including the American Chemistry Council, asked to reconsider the main components of several rules. Group said, “The facilities affected by this program are important components of the American economy, supporting millions of jobs, running innovation and maintaining our global competition,” groups said. “It is necessary that EPA take immediate action to fix important areas of this rule.”
He asked the agency to close immediately Public data equipment It allowed communities to look at the details of local sites that store dangerous chemicals including information about previous accidents.
Planned rewriting is the latest in a long policy known as a risk management program. The first introduced in 1996, the RMP controls around 12,000 features that handle dangerous chemicals, which handles dangerous chemicals including factories, wholesalers, oil refineries, natural gas plants, waste water treatment plants and fertilizer distributors.
Many of the features are important infrastructure, but also a risk for nearby communities, which has large amounts of high amounts of highly dangerous substances such as chlorine, waterless ammonia and vinyl chloride.
The EPA has speculated that more than 130 million people live within more than three miles of sites that handle dangerous chemicals that were covered by the Biden-era rule. A 2020 Congress Research Service report stated that the “worst position” accident on any of the most dangerous sites may endanger 100,000 people or more.
Former President Barack Obama tried to strengthen the rules after a deadly 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas and killed 15 people and injured more than 160. The first Trump administration stopped the difficult requirements before taking effects. President Biden re -presented the difficult rules in 2021, and finalized them last year.
