Fueled By Climate Change, Hurricanes Are Causing Industrial Accidents. Who's Liable?

Short Wave

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🗓️ 29 September 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Fueled by climate change, hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent. Those storms have repeatedly led to spills and fires at chemical manufacturing plants along the Gulf Coast.

But can companies — and the people who work for them — be held responsible or even sent to prison for failing to adequately prepare for climate change?

NPR's Rebecca Hersher reported on that question, which is at the center of a recent lawsuit.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.4	Maddie Sifai here with NPR Science reporter Rebecca Hersher Heybecky.
0:09.3	Hey, so you just got back from the Gulf Coast where you were covering Hurricane Laura.
0:15.1	How was your trip?
0:16.4	The hurricane damage was really bad.
0:18.3	You know, a lot of people down there have lost their homes, which is hard to see.
0:23.0	Yeah.
0:24.0	And just to remind everybody, Laura was the one that hit the Texas Louisiana border in August.
0:29.5	You know, this storm is clearly roaring and you're reaching that critical moment here.
0:34.8	This now joins an elite group.
0:36.5	It's in the top 10, a small elite group of the most dangerous hurricanes
0:40.8	to ever make landfall into the US.
0:43.2	Residents along the Gulf Coast are bracing for potential devastation.
0:47.0	Hurricane Laura and that area is so flat.
0:50.6	It is so full of petrochemical facilities too.
0:53.9	There are these refineries, a lot of new natural gas infrastructure.
0:58.1	There are chemical plants that manufacture all sorts of things like plastics and solvents.
1:03.0	Actually, even the raw materials for PPE, a lot of them are manufactured down there,
1:06.7	like rubber gloves and surgical masks.
1:08.9	So what happened when the hurricane kind of hit all of that?
1:12.2	A lot of them shut down.
1:13.7	And when petrochemical facilities shut down, they usually release a lot of pollution.
	...

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