Even today, more than five years later, residents still talk about the fire. The chemical facility burned for three days, leaked toxic runoff into the waterways, forced schools and businesses to close and prompted a shelter-in-place order for everyone in Deer Park — a city just southeast of Houston in Texas’ crowded petrochemical corridor.
Eventually, after a thick layer of pollution covered the area for days, residents learned that a tank at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. had erupted in flames and that employees had been unable to contain it. Following the event, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, an independent and nonregulatory federal agency, opened an investigation, finding that a lack of proper safeguards, among other issues, was to blame.
The probe was nothing new for the agency, commonly known as the Chemical Safety Board, or for Texas. For decades, the CSB has investigated hazardous incidents, like the Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire, throughout the United States. But that could soon end. The Trump administration is proposing to defund the CSB in the 2026 federal budget and shut the agency down by the end of 2025, alarming residents living near the petrochemical plants, industry workers, public health officials and environmentalists…