Standing Committee Symposium on The Role of Private Institutions in Public Environmental Decisionmaking: Private Facilitating and Adjudicative Functions: B. The Example of the National Institute for Chemical Studies

Lewis Crampton

Lewis Crampton is Executive Director, National Institute for Chemical Studies, Charleston, WV.

The National Institute for Chemical Studies isan organization established by local leadership to assess the magnitude of chemical risks in West Virginia's Kanawha Valley and what should be done to control them. We are located in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, which is about 35 miles long, and runs from Nitro to Belle. Within its boundaries live about 250,000 people cheek-by-jowl with approximately twenty chemical manufacturing facilities. Union Carbide was born here, and two of its largest plants remain: the famous facility at Institute, West Virginia, which makes aldicarb-based pesticides and agricultural products, and a plant in South Charleston. DuPont has a major facility in Belle where rayon was invented. Monsanto has a large plant down in Nitro. Diamond Shamrock, Owen, FMC and a number of others are scattered throughout the territory.

There are a number of nasty chemicals in the Kanawha Valley — hydrogen cyanide, phosphorous, MIC, phosgene — about ninety of which appear on EPA's Chemical Emergency Preparedness Program List. They are the kinds of chemicals that (if people knew all there is to know about them) would certainly inspire feelings of fear and loathing among the general public in this area. Moreover, for a long time, there have been rumors about the Kanawha Valley being a "cancer valley." Add to this the Bhopal incident and the highly-publicized release at Institute last August 11, and we find that people are asking some serious questions about the benefits of better living through chemistry for the very first time. Our very first act, once we were established, was to take a public opinion poll to find out what was on folks' minds.

A common question most people have is the risk assessment question: "How bad is this? I always thought things were going just fine down here. My brother works in that plant and he tells me it's safe. How bad is it really?"

Another question is: "What can, should, or is being done to deal with the situation here?" This is a risk management question.

People are also asking, who is going to do what? This raises the whole spectrum of local, state, federal, and private sector efforts that may be needed to redress the situation.

Finally, a key question is: What are the costs? How do we arrive at a concept of acceptable risk down here? Nobody in the Kanawha Valley wants to throw the chemical companies out. The chemical industry provides ten percent of all the manufacturing jobs and practically all of the quality jobs in that area. West Virginia is now vying with Mississippi for the highest unemployment rate of any state in the country. This is not a Superfund¹ site where there are no visible benefits, and everybody wants a 100 percent cleanup. There are some clear and real benefits from the continuation of this level of chemical activity in the Valley.

Enter the National Institute for Chemical Studies — after Bhopal, but just before Institute. We are a locally founded, nonprofit 501-C organization, and about one year old today. Bill Ruckelshaus, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), introduced me to the people down there in West Virginia to help get it going. Bill now serves as chair of the Institute's National Advisory Board.

Some of the Institute's key characteristics are as follows:

(1) It is a bridging organization. The idea is to get everybody on the same side of the table and to recognize that we have jointly a problem and that we need to seek solutions [17 ELR 10267] together. This is a formula for success that has eluded us for many years in the environmental movement. Thus far, I think we have been successful.

(2) The National Institute for Chemical Studies is a facilitative organization. It is not an alternative to the other efforts underway. We are not the only game around. The federal, state and local agencies continue to play their roles with respect to investigation, enforcement, and the like.

(3) We are a coalition organization, a Noah's Ark of interest groups — two scientists, two environmentalists, some business people, public officials, the Governor, United States Senators, and a local Congressman. We have representation from the chemical companies, the major environmental organizations in the area, and community residents who live around the plants.

(4) Our funding sources include $250,000 from the federal government and $150,000 from the State of West Virginia (on top of last year's $150,000). The local community has raised $50,000. We have thus far received around $200,000 from chemical companies like Carbide, Monsanto, and DuPont. Just a couple of weeks ago we got our first environmental foundation contribution, a $25,000 grant from the Virginia Environmental Endowment.

(5) Although we are acting locally, with virtually all of our programs restricted to the Kanawha Valley, we do hope to have national impact through the device of franchising successful programs or problem-solving approaches to other organizations that are engaged in similar work.

Our main goals are (1) To help the general public work through the risks, benefits and choices that go with having the chemical industry as such close neighbors. The essence of risk communication is to help people work through these issues by separating out trivial risks from important risks and focusing everyone's collective energy on solving the important problems. (2) We are trying to help area chemical companies act out of stewardship. I define stewardship in two ways: First, we help companies understand that it is important to them to be more forthcoming about what they are producing, how they are producing it, and how they are managing the everday risks they take for granted but ordinary citizens know nothing about behind those big plant gates. Second, we encourage our companies to do the right thing before regulations, an accident, or further negative public opinion cut off their options. In the process, we also try to pat them on the back a bit.

It is indeed surprising how a little praise and support from a credible, broad-based organization can influence companies to undertake major pollution control or safety systems expenses on their own. This includes voluntary emissions reductions and source control activities that go well beyond legal and regulatory requirements.

Our mission is to protect health and the environment, and at the same time to maintain the economic base. We are not an enforcement agency, nor are we an advocacy agency. We are not seeking to achieve a zero risk environment. What we are trying to do is to reduce the major risks one by one, to identify the risks that remain, pursue the solutions that exist, and keep everyone moving in a positive direction.

Our project has a national scope for a number of reasons. Thirty to thirty-five percent of the total pollution burden in the United States happens in about two percent of the nation's land area. If one seeks to develop a national environmental policy, it makes sense to try new things in areas where there are complex pollution problems that are generated by concentrated industrial activity. In addition, we are trying to handle dangerous technologies in an open way in a democratic society. If, for example, we cannot live with the chemical industry and other technologies that have been around for forty years or more, what chance do we have as an innovative society of moving forward to deal with the newer technologies, which now inspire even greater dread — genetics, biotechnology, nuclear medicine, and the like?

The National Institute for Chemical Studies has an opportunity to work through some of these issues in an area where the technologies are reasonably well known with the hope that our findings will be applicable to other areas down the road.

In observing what is going on in the Valley, we have chosen four approaches:

(1) The long-term emissions problem, mainly dealing with chronic effects.

(2) Accident prevention.

(3) Contingency planning and emergency response preparedness.

(4) We are trying to get a dialogue going, about risks, benefits and choices. People want to know, and they want to participate in finding out what risks exist and what might be done about them.

Let me turn to some of our specific projects. First, we have been working to assist our chemical companies to step up voluntarily and reduce their routine, allowable emissions by significant amounts. Absolutely everybody in the Kanawha Valley is in compliance. No company is facing an enforcement action. The area is in attainment with its State Implementation Plan. With regard to Section 112 requirements of the Clean Air Act,² the standards have not yet been written for some of the major chemical pollutants.

In such a situation, what the plant manager does to achieve significant environmental protection gains is far more important than what the bureaucrats in Washington do. The Institute has worked alongside the plants and with the state's air pollution control agency to convince four companies — Union Carbide, Monsanto, DuPont and Diamond Shamrock — to reduce by 2,000 tons per year their total toxic air emissions. This constitutes a 25 percent reduction of total plant-wide emissions for the six largest facilities in the Kanawha Valley. Target toxic pollutants include hydrogen cyanide, methylene chloride, carbon tetrachloride, chlorine, ammonia, formaldehyde, acrolian, and many, many others.

The companies have accomplished these reductions in a variety of ways. They may have changed feed stocks, reconfigured production processes, purchased new control technology or shut down an inefficient process unit. We have tried to leave it to the ingenuity of the local plant manager. Any of these reductions, in order to receive our support, must have been approved by the West Virginia Air Pollution Control Commission.

Many Valley residents are worried that they may be getting cancer. To begin the process of finding out the magnitude of any risk from long-term exposures to chemical plant emissions, we invited researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health down to the Kanawha Valley to design a health exposure effects study. It is probably the first attempt to conduct such a study focusing on organic pollutants. We are not sure whether we can define an exposure gradient for the Kanawha Valley and develop connections between emissions on the one hand and disease end points (morbidity data) on the other. We have good emissions data, however, and we are developing reasonably good morbidity data. We also have [17 ELR 10268] a fairly isolated setting, so if this kind of study can be done anywhere, there is a good possibility that it can be carried out in the Kanawha Valley.

There is widespread community participation in this effort. Neighborhood residents and chemical plant personnel have been attending our workshops. The Directors of the State Air Pollution Control Commission and the State Department of Health are also involved. We are trying to provide the room, the intellectual leadership, and the money to get it done.

A third major long-term impacts program is the EPA/West Virginia Air Pollution Control Commission Emissions Modeling and Screening Study. It has provided us with an excellent air emissions inventory. EPA has some modeling protocols, which are a component of their integrated environmental management project, to estimate what happens to these emissions: where they go, and what are the potential risks. At the end of this first phase, then, we will have a rough idea of (1) what the potential point sources of concern are in the Valley, (2) what their potential concentration levels are, (3) what pollutants we ought to be worried about, and (4) what geographic areas ought to be looked at more closely — North Charleston, Belle, Nitro, or what have you. It is basically an environmental road map we can use to help us sort out where problems are located and devise some approaches to solve them.

In the area of chemical plant safety, we are doing an inventory of the fifty or sixty most hazardous chemicals in the Valley, locating them on a map, and making that map public. We want to encourage a public dialogue with the plant managers in the Valley, so that they can tell the public about what they are doing to control or mitigate the potential risks. The idea is to serve as a facilitator equipped to ask tough questions in a safe and supportive environment. Our goal is to get the information and make it public, but to do it in ways that bring people together, not drive them apart. We are working with the Center for Chemical Plant Safety of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and we have retained our own consultants, Bechtel Corporation and Arthur D. Little, to help us with technical matters.

Why are the chemical companies going along with this? Part of this project will involve documenting voluntary action by the chemical companies to reduce the amounts of these hazardous materials in their production process and as waste byproducts. The chemical companies want that story told, because they have indeed made some significant strides in the area. Union Carbide says that over fifty percent of its hazardous materials have been eliminated since 1984, and DuPont and Monsanto are claiming reductions almost as high. Because our organization is perceived as credible and can provide appropriate support and encouragement for these important actions that go a long way to insuring a safer and healthier environment, the companies start feeling good about themselves, and they are willing to do more.

In the area of emergency response and contingency planning, the Institute is working to focus the entire Kanawha Valley on utilizing a single response center (there are 24 different municipalities and 11 unincorporated areas and two counties in Kanawha Valley), a single schedule for holding and evaluating the results of preparedness drills, a single set of standards and procedures for accident notification, and a single, areawide response plan and set of implementing procedures. In our opinion, these are the key preconditions for an effective emergency response program in a complex area like ours.

We have helped to develop the Kanawha Valley Emergency Council, which is composed of community first responder agencies and all of the plant safety directors. When one attends a meeting of this group, it is a pretty impressive gathering. If an accident occurs at a chemical manufacturing facility, these folks will be the ones out there where the rubber meets the road; they are there to respond to the problem.

It is helpful to have centralized emergency response for more than just the big incidents. There will always be small steam leaks, perhaps once a week, and people will call up to ask about the noises they heard the previous night. For three months, I lived in a neighborhood in North Charleston right next door to a big chemical plant. The second night I was there, all of a sudden all kinds of bells and whistles were sounding, and I could hear one overarching sound: four beeps, then one beep, and then five beeps — the San Francisco area code.

Like a fool, I did the same thing that killed 3,000 people at Bhopal. I got up out of my bed, walked over to the plant gate and started looking in. If you have never been through something like that, and you don't understand what all those bells, whistles and sirens mean, it is easy to get real scared real quick. It is a part of the general anxiety that all neighborhoods feel, no matter how long they have lived with a chemical plant. We have been working with local plants to make their internal safety and internal warning procedures public, so that everybody is more aware of what is going on. This has had a positive impact in reducing tensions in the Institute and North Charleston neighborhoods.

To begin the process of eliciting an areawide dialogue among residents, we hired the Public Agenda Foundation in New York, run by Dan Yankelovich. We first did a series of focus group interviews, some just after the August 11 Institute accident, to try to ascertain baseline attitudes. We then conducted a major public opinion survey for this area, about 850 respondents from the total of 250,000 residents. We found that, indeed, people were quite disturbed about health and safety. They have generally good feelings about the chemical industry as a whole, but they don't trust the industry as a source of information.

Another important thing we learned from our survey is that a surprisingly strong feeling for public health and environmental protection exists here. There is no "Faustian bargain" with industry to hold on to jobs and economic development. Some outsiders look at West Virginia and say: They'll take anything to get jobs, right? Not true. The folks down there do not want the laws and regulations rolled back in order to create more jobs. As a matter of fact, they want stricter enforcement of environmental and health laws and regulations than they have had up to this point.

Finally, we learned that people in the Kanawha Valley want to know what is going on, and they want some way to be able to have an impact on the process, to be involved and to have their views heard and taken into account when and if solutions to any major problems are being developed.

The Institute now has a program to develop the information from the projects that I've mentioned over the next year and then run an intensive three-month public campaign to work through with people the risks, benefits and choices that are a part of living with a large slice of the chemical process industry. The publisher of the local newspaper is on our board, along with some of the biggest advertisers in the state, so we can look forward to some free TV and newspaper support. Once we have drawn out the key issues and the choices, we plan to set up a way for people to feed information back, [17 ELR 10269] perhaps by a vote or a hearing.

Let me turn now to some practical insights concerning how the Institute has approached its mission. For an organization like ours, operating as a new organization in a semi-polarized setting, credibility is the most important thing. I think we are demonstrating that a coalition organization has the best chance of gaining this all-important credibility. There is, of course, no assurance that it will in fact be credible simply because its membership is broad-based. However, people are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt because all of the acknowledged experts in relevant fields are members and the key interest groups are represented.

Once you've gained that credibility, it is up to your organization to reinforce it every day in open proceedings. Sometimes this is difficult, especially when you're dealing with a culture that is used to working differently. In West Virginia, usually two or three people go off to a back room alone, settle the matter, and then inform everybody else how the world works. If that were to occur in our situation, we would never get anything done, and no one would believe us. It has taken some powerful persuasion to get some of the board members to understand how to operate in the sunshine.

The next step is to create an atmosphere in which good things can happen. It is often a judgment call as to whether to play a leadership or a supportive role. There are a number of groups in the Kanawha Valley who want to do positive things. At times, we have had to get out of their way in order to let them carry out their programs, even when it meant abandoning our own "solutions." Indeed, to borrow an earlier metaphor about horses, the trick is in getting everybody to ride the horse in the direction it is going once the course has been set. People fall off the horse and want to run some place else, and we have had to stop the horse one way or another and pull them back on.

To be successful, a facilitative organization like the Institute needs a quality that management experts call "simultaneous loose-type properties." That is, it must develop a vision and a coherent program along with a means for determining accountability, yet it must be flexible enough to drop unproductive approaches and take advantage of new opportunities when they arise.

It helps if one has, as we do in West Virginia, the resources, clout and contacts to enable us to get the job done — or even the appearance of such. We have tried to flow with the situation, based on an informed understanding of people's interests, to knit the positive perceptions together to create an advancing, developing and productive environment that promotes creative problem-solving. The results thus far in getting voluntary emissions reductions, more information about health and safety from the companies, better dialogue from all parties, a vastly improved emergency response capability, seem to show that this approach is working so far.

Is the National Institute for Chemical Studies the answer? I do not propose to say that it is the whole answer. But some of the things we are doing may be of help to other organizations in other, similar situations around the country. Thirty to thirty-five percent of the entire pollution burden in the United States — what we're trying to protect the environment against — occurs in a very small part of the country, just two percent of its land area. If we can make some real progress in one of these kinds of areas, as we hope to, then perhaps we can set an example for the rest of the nation. Ultimately, that is what the National Institute for Chemical Studies expects to do. This approach, while perhaps unconventional now, has to succeed if we ever expect to undermine the litigious approach we have lived with for the past ten years or so and substitute a new method that includes a strong sense of corporate stewardship and local involvement to protecting public health, safety and the environment.

1. Superfund is the popular name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 9601-9675, ELR STAT. 44001.

2. U.S.C. §§ 7401-7642, ELR STAT. 42201.