The U.S. Chemical Safety Board will not deploy a team to investigate an incident earlier this week that sent 11 workers at a Marshall County chemical plant to the hospital, the chairwoman of the board says.
CSB Chairwoman Vanessa Sutherland said in an email message that the agency "gathered data directly from the company and from public sources to evaluate the facts of the incident," but would not be deploying a team to the Axiall Corp. facility at Natrium.
Sutherland said the decision was made on Wednesday. It was not publicly confirmed until Thursday evening.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has said that the incident involved "a failure" of the boiler, which resulted in a breach in a boiler wall. Contract employees from the Washington, Pennsylvania-based firm Chapman Corporation were performing work not related to the boiler, but were in the area at the time.
Workers received burns and inhalation injuries. Eight of them were treated and released from area hospitals after the incident on Tuesday morning. Three workers were kept overnight for medical observation, and then released on Wednesday.
The CSB has not launched a full investigation since it deployed in February 2015 to an explosion at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, where two workers were hurt and debris was released into the surrounding community.
Sutherland was confirmed by the Senate as the new CSB chairwoman in August, after President Obama in March pushed out previous chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso.
In late October, the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility criticized the CSB, saying that since March there had been at least 19 major accidents -- involving 16 deaths and 32 serious injuries -- and the agency had not opened an investigation into a single one of them. The group said that it appeared to be the longest period of CSB inactivity since 2000.
Since that criticism, the CSB did quietly deploy a team to the Delaware City Refining Company in Delaware City, Delaware, on Dec. 3, following a fire that sent one worker to the hospital. That deployment was not publicly announced and an investigation into the incident is not listed on the CSB's website.
Boad spokeswoman Shauna Lawhorne said this week that the fire was the third incident at the facility in the last four months, and occurred at a refinery the CSB has investigated twice before.
"Therefore we gathered information about the accident, but we are not, however, launching a full investigation," Lawhorne said. "The agency is currently evaluating the data to determine our next steps."
The Axiall Corp. incident this week followed a fatality at the facility last year and what company officials described as a "near-catastrophic blowout" the year before that during a natural gas drilling operation at the plant site.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.