Trump Moved to Eliminate Chemical Safety Board Before Deadly Spill Killed 11
New polling shows even 82 percent of Trump supporters want stronger federal protections from toxic pollution.
By Mike Ludwig ,
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In photos taken from above, the collapsed tank at the Nippon Dynawave paper mill in Longview, Washington, looks like a crushed tin can. Capable of holding 900,000 gallons of chemicals, the massive tank was filled to 90 percent capacity when it ruptured on the morning of May 26.
Norman Barlow’s family says he worked as an electrical engineer at the Nippon mill for only three months before the collapsing tank released a wave of toxic fumes and liquid, killing Barlow and 10 other workers. The 58-year-old from Vancouver was already “trying to leave” the job due to “safety concerns” and “how the place was ran,” according to his daughter, Brooke Iverson.
“My dad was really just trying to get out of there as soon as he could,” Iverson said in an interview with KGW. Iverson said the families of the 11 victims deserve answers about how the nation’s latest chemical disaster could have been prevented.
However, the Trump administration has asked Congress to eliminate the only independent federal agency that investigates major chemical accidents while systemically rolling back environmental regulations, including rules designed to protect communities from toxic spills. New polling suggests a bipartisan majority of voters are increasingly worried about toxic chemicals and want stronger federal protection from air and water pollution, which can increase health care costs.
“Nippon’s time is coming,” Iverson said. “They’re on a clock now — a clock of answers, a clock of what happens now.”
The paper mill is a major employer in Longview, a community now in mourning. The tank contained a toxic byproduct known as “white liquor” that burns human skin on contact. The chemical killed more than 2,000 fish after spilling into local waterways and the Columbia River, but officials have said drinking water is safe. It took days for crews to clean up the toxic spill and remove the victims. State and federal investigations are ongoing, leaving neighbors and families to wait for answers.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board opened an investigation and dispatched a team to Longview on May 27, one day after the incident. Congress created the independent federal watchdog in 1990 to hold polluters accountable and recommend safety improvements after major industrial accidents, which are alarmingly common in the United States.
In addition to investigating seven other industrial accidents, the Chemical Safety Board is currently investigating a toxic gas leak on April 22 that killed two workers and injured 19 at a troubled refinery in West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley, an area with a long history of industrial fires, explosions, and chemical spills. The board is also examining an explosion at a Pennsylvania steel plant that killed two workers and injured more than a dozen in August 2025.
President Donald Trump’s proposed 2027 federal budget would eliminate the Chemical Safety Board.
However, President Donald Trump’s proposed 2027 federal budget would eliminate the Chemical Safety Board as part of an apparent effort to rid the federal government of civil servants who might resist the president’s ever-shifting political whims. Echoing lobbyists for polluting industries, the White House claims the safety board “duplicates” work done by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), producing “unprompted studies” and proposing “regulations” it has no authority to enforce.
Unlike the EPA, the Chemical Safety Board operates independently from the president’s cabinet and political appointees. With an annual budget of about $14 million, the board cannot enforce regulations, but its investigations into fires, spills, explosions, and other accidents result in recommendations for regulators and private companies to make chemical storage and processing safer for workers and surrounding communities.
Congress rejected the White House’s original proposal to shut down the U.S. Chemical Safety Board by October 2025, but House Republicans are now pushing a budget bill that would cut the watchdog’s funding by 40 percent.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also taken a sledgehammer to the EPA by firing staff, slashing budgets, and undermining independent scientists studying the effects of toxic pollution on public health. Under EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency is systematically weakening federal environmental protections, including rules finalized in 2024 that require industrial polluters to coordinate with local first responders and create risk-management plans for handling dangerous chemicals near residential areas. For example, the EPA is moving to scrap a rule that would have required industrial facilities to use safer (but potentially more expensive) chemicals and technology in some cases.
Ana Parras, executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, called the EPA’s proposed changes “a direct assault on safety and a political gift to polluters,” in a statement on February 19. “For fenceline communities and facility workers, this rollback is a declaration that our lives are deemed acceptable sacrifices,” Parras added.
A nationwide poll of 2,025 registered voters released on June 3 suggests Trump’s deregulatory agenda is not meeting the expectations of voters after the president promised to deliver the “cleanest air and water on Earth” during his 2024 campaign.
By an 8 to 1 margin, voters across the political spectrum said the EPA should prioritize protecting public health from toxic pollution over reducing regulations — even if it means higher costs.
By an 8 to 1 margin, voters across the political spectrum said the EPA should prioritize protecting public health from toxic pollution over reducing regulations — even if it means higher costs. The cost of health care remains a top concern, and 81 percent said the rollback of EPA regulations is shifting the burden of pollution “onto families through medical bills and long-term health consequences.”
“They aren’t buying the idea that rolling back protections makes life more affordable … pollution prevention is part of protecting families from costs they cannot afford,” said John Ray, senior director at YouGov, which conducted the poll, in a call with reporters on June 3.
Based in Washington, Peter Murchie worked at the EPA for 25 years before becoming the senior director of policy at the Environmental Protection Network, which commissioned the new poll. Murchie said both the Chemical Safety Board and EPA play important roles in preventing and responding to chemical disasters, including the deadly “white liquor” spill in Longview.
“EPA has a very important role both in the prevention of accidents like this one and of chemical exposure to workers and the community, and also the response, and you have seen in the reporting that the EPA is on scene with the emergency response folks,” Murchie told reporters on the press call.
The new poll shows that 82 percent of Trump’s notoriously loyal supporters say the president should be tougher on polluters, and 42 percent view Trump’s handling of the EPA less favorably than his overall job performance. Support for strengthening the EPA among all voters has risen from 50 percent in 2024 to 64 percent when the poll was conducted in late April, a few weeks before the deadly spill in Longview. Yet Trump and Zeldin are moving in the exact opposite direction in order to reduce costs and maximize profits for private industry.
“There’s this belief that the left wants more regulations and the right wants less,” Ray said. “But for most people, there is broad-based concern about making sure the government is doing whatever it is supposed to be doing to keep water clean and air clean and food clean and so on.”
Do You Know What’s in the Air Your Children Breathe?
Nearly half of kids in the US are breathing unhealthy air; it’s time for the EPA to return to its lifesaving mission of protecting their lungs.
An oil refinery, owned by Exxon Mobil, is the second largest in the country on 28th February 2020 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States.
(Photo by Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images)
Christy Sadreameli
Jun 05, 2026
Parents have a lot on their minds. I am a mom of a 3-year-old and a 7-year old and a pediatric pulmonologist. Like many other parents, I am constantly juggling the logistics of family life, school, and work. Keeping my children healthy and safe is a priority.
Food is one example. I try to ensure my children eat healthy, nutritious food that won’t make them sick or contribute to the formation of chronic disease, like some ultra-processed foods can. As the parent of a picky eater, finding healthy foods my children will actually eat can be challenging.
I know that parents do not need another thing to be concerned about. They certainly shouldn’t have to worry about the air their children breathe. But the American Lung Association’s recent “State of the Air” report found that nearly half of kids in the US are breathing unhealthy air. More specifically, the report found that 33.5 million children, or 46% of people under 18 years old in the US, live in an area that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. More than 7 million children in the United States (10% of all kids) live in a community with failing grades for all three measures studied in the report.
This is unacceptable, especially because studies show that infants, children, and teens as a group are more susceptible to the health impacts of air pollution, and that some of these harms can be lifelong. Compared with adults, infants and children breathe more air relative to their body size and they are frequently playing outside where they are exposed to outdoor air. The fact that the lungs continue to develop throughout childhood plays a role.
Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.
In the past year, there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to preventing chronic disease in children—for good reason. We all want to set our children up for the healthiest lives possible. But the conversation about chronic disease prevention must include cleaning up air pollution. Air pollution exposure in childhood can cause long-term harm by impeding lung growth, contributing to new asthma cases, causing flareups in people with asthma and other lung conditions, increasing risk of respiratory infections and more.
Air pollution can even harm children before they are born. Air pollution is linked to preterm birth, low birth weight, lower lung capacity, and other adverse birth outcomes. That means that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and childhood could even set a child up for a lifetime of poor lung health. As children grow into adulthood, breathing air pollution can cause respiratory and cardiovascular harm, asthma attacks, lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke, even early death.
So what is driving the ground-level ozone pollution and particle pollution reported on in “State of the Air?” There are many sources, but the main ones include diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources, emissions from the oil and gas industry, and wildfires. Higher temperatures can exacerbate this, as heat accelerates the production of ozone. While the US has made incredible progress in cleaning up air pollution over the past 50 years, the changing climate is making air pollution more likely to form and more difficult to clean up.
Here is more bad news: While half of the children in the US are breathing unhealthy air, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to roll back and repeal safeguards designed to reduce air pollution. In recent months, EPA announced a rule to weaken limits to protect children from mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, eliminated the standards to regulate emissions from vehicles, and delayed implementation of a rule to reduce pollution from oil and gas wells. On top of that, EPA recently decided to eliminate health-related data from its analyses of clean air measures, meaning that the costs of pollution to our kids, families, and communities will not be counted as policies are rolled back.
This is particularly upsetting, as I see what an impact air pollution can have on children and families in my day-to-day work as a pediatric pulmonologist. For decades, EPA has calculated the costs of air pollution to the health and livelihood of people, including asthma attacks and premature deaths. EPA is still including the cost to industry in their economic analyses, which means it will be easier to achieve further rollbacks of regulations while omitting the devastating costs to children and communities. Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.
The good news is that federal clean air protections work when they are enforced. The Clean Air Act is regarded as one of the most successful public health laws in US history. For 55 years, it has protected children, families, and communities from harmful pollution and driven innovation toward a cleaner, healthier future. The Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority and responsibility to assess and clean up air pollution from vehicles, power plants, and industries across the nation. We rely on EPA to protect our lungs. I urge EPA to return to its lifesaving mission of protecting human health by reducing deadly air pollution instead of allowing more of it, and value people’s lives and the health costs of pollution in their rulemaking processes.
As I read the labels on foods, buckle my sons into their car seats, and put their helmets on before they jump onto scooters and bikes, I also check the air quality on my phone. I teach my patients and their parents to do the same. But there is only so much I—or any parent—can do to protect my kids from air pollution.
EPA must protect our air and value our kids’ health. All lungs, especially little lungs, are counting on it.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Christy Sadreameli
Dr. S. Christy Sadreameli is a pediatric pulmonologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where she takes care of pediatric patients of all ages with a variety of pulmonary conditions. She is also a volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association to help communicate important health information to parents all over the country.
Full Bio >
TU Graz physicist presents mobile device for high-precision measurement of air pollutants
The UV dual-comb spectrometer detects harmful gases with unrivalled accuracy and sensitivity. The compact design allows mobile use for monitoring air quality with a range of several kilometers
Graz University of Technology
image:
The optical configuration of the UV dualcomb spectrometer.
view moreCredit: Oliver WOlf - TU Graz
Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt and her team at the Institute of Experimental Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) have developed a new type of UV dual-comb spectrometer that detects gaseous air pollutants with unrivalled accuracy and sensitivity. Using ultraviolet double laser light, the device measures the concentration of harmful gases such as formaldehyde within half a second. Thanks to its compact design and a measuring range of up to two and a half kilometres, the spectrometer is not only suitable for laboratory analyses, but also for mobile measurements in cities, industrial areas and agricultural regions.
Fingerprint of pollutants
As a starting point for its measurement, the device generates two laser pulses in the ultraviolet spectral range within fractions of a second. When this UV light hits gas molecules, it excites them electronically and causes them to rotate and vibrate – physicists refer to this as rovibronic transitions. These transitions are different for every gaseous substance and swallow up part of the laser light in a unique way. “Every air pollutant therefore has its own fingerprint, which our UV dual-comb spectrometer recognises,” says Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt.
Schultze-Bernhardt and her team developed the first version of their spectrometer a good two years ago. At the time, it was the first of its kind in the world, but large laboratory set-ups were necessary for the measurements. The new version has been shrunk to the size of a cardboard removal box. One reason for this is that one laser source instead of two now generates the double laser pulse. “This also allows us to dispense with the complex electronic stabilisation of the system,” explains Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt.
Resolution of 1 GHz
The new spectrometer can detect the frequencies of UV light with a resolution of 1 GHz and thus significantly outperforms all conventional UV spectrometers. This enabled the researchers to gain new, fundamental insights into the UV light absorption of the air pollutant formaldehyde: “We measured absorption patterns of formaldehyde that had never been observed experimentally before, as the resolution of any previous devices was too imprecise,” says Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt.
57-year-old rotational constants corrected
The measurements in Graz have shown that the rotational constants of formaldehyde, which have been available in physics databases and textbooks since the 1960s, are incorrect. “In collaboration with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics in the USA, we have corrected the values of this fundamental, molecule-specific parameter by up to 15 per cent,” says Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt. Collaboration with Rolf Breinbauer from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at TU Graz, who produced high-purity formaldehyde for the investigations in a two-stage process, also contributed to this progress in basic research.
Practical application in environmental protection
Beyond basic research, the spectrometer has the potential to make the measurement of air pollutants and gas leaks in cities and industrial areas much more precise and easier. “In principle, our device can accurately detect any semi-transparent, gaseous substance. And we are currently working on determining the concentration of several pollutants with a single measurement,” says Birgitta Schultze-Bernhardt. Funded by a Proof of Concept Grant from the European Research Council, the experimental physicist is also currently developing a UV spectrometer that can also be used by laypersons to monitor air quality, for example in companies or environmental authorities.
Funded by the Austrian Science Fund, ERC and NAWI Graz
The development of the UV dual-comb spectrometer is based on research projects led by Birgitta Schultz-Bernhardt, which were funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and the European Research Council. The NAWI Graz cooperation initiative financed the novel laser source of the current spectrometer as part of its infrastructure funding.
Journal
PhotoniX
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Free-running ultraviolet dual comb spectroscopy enabling absolute electronic fingerprinting
