July 15, 2026
EHS Risk Explained
Serious chemical accidents hit a five-year high in 2025, and most companies have no way to see that risk sitting inside their own supply chain. We’ve covered regulators using AI to target inspections and outside groups gathering their own emissions data. This week, the story moves further down the chain, to what happens when the incident isn’t at your facility at all. It’s at your supplier’s.
What’s Changed
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Chemical Safety Board (CSB) data, 2025 saw 131 serious chemical accidents, up 20% from 109 the year before. Eighty-nine involved a death or serious injury, and the year’s toll came to 48 deaths, nearly double 2024’s, and 142 serious injuries. Reported incidents since 2020 now exceed 600, across 46 states.
Two Recent Incidents
Two incidents last month put the trend in stark relief. As reported by the Journal’s Shalini Ramachandran and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky, a 900,000-gallon tank holding white liquor, a corrosive papermaking chemical, failed at a Nippon Dynawave facility, killing 11 workers. The Journal reported that an employee had fallen into a sinkhole of scalding pulp stock just weeks earlier, an incident the company characterized as a near miss, and that a worker-safety complaint was already on file with state regulators.
In Garden Grove, California, overheating in a methyl methacrylate tank at a 60-year-old GKN Aerospace plant forced the evacuation of more than 40,000 residents. Neither white liquor nor methyl methacrylate is on the EPA’s list of chemicals subject to its stricter Risk Management Program (RMP) rules. Facilities handling them still have general Clean Air Act safety obligations, just not RMP’s more rigorous prevention requirements, a distinction some companies overlook.
Although your company may not be a chemical manufacturer, it’s hard to find an industrial business that doesn’t use or manage chemicals somewhere in its own operations. Neither of May’s incidents happened at a chemical producer. They occurred at a paper mill and an aerospace parts plant, which is exactly the point. This kind of risk isn’t confined to the chemical sector.
The GKN Case Led to Federal and Local Investigations
On June 10, the EPA and FBI executed a federal search warrant at the GKN plant, seizing environmental samples and records. The warrant targets potential Clean Air Act violations and runs alongside a separate criminal probe already opened by the Orange County District Attorney. A federal search warrant is not the typical response to this type of incident, but it signals that the cop hasn’t left the environmental beat.
Repeating Patterns and Aging Plants
The WSJ analysis found that about a quarter of the incidents it reviewed since 2020 involved sites with at least one other CSB-reported accident. One pipeline operator alone accounted for nearly 30 incidents across 26 facilities over six years; a major food producer logged eight, including a fatal explosion at one of its plants that drew an OSHA citation.
Facility age can be a big issue too. Mike Schmidt, principal at Bluefield Process Safety, told the WSJ that the average U.S. chemical plant is 46 years old.
The EHS-Procurement Gap
A catastrophic incident is rarely the first sign of trouble. It’s usually the loudest one in a string of quieter, often public, warning signs. Nippon Dynawave had been cited for safety violations four times since 2019, had two open state investigations, and had a worker complaint on file about a sinkhole in the plant floor weeks before the tank failed. GKN Aerospace had its own history of citations, including a major air-quality fine and a compliance notice as recently as last year.
One reason those warning signs are missed by customers is that the knowledge needed to catch them often sits between two functions at a company: procurement and EHS. Procurement is expert at sourcing; EHS is expert at identifying and managing risk. When those two teams aren’t comparing notes, patterns like these can go unseen until it’s too late.
What This Means for You
GKN and Nippon Dynawave sit in two very different sectors — aerospace parts and paper — but both incidents involve the same underlying issues: hazardous materials, older infrastructure, and years of public data that could have flagged the risk. The question isn’t just whether your own operations are clean. It’s whether you know the age, track record, and incident history of the plants you depend on, before one of them disrupts yours.
None of this has to stay a blind spot. A plant’s track record is largely public, even if it isn’t always easy to find. That’s the gap Ecolumix was built to close — helping companies see where their supply chain risk actually sits, before a vendor’s incident turns into their own scramble.
Until next week,
Doug Parker
CEO, Ecolumix
Coming in future issues:
Your watershed already has a scoreboard, and it’s public. Every direct discharger’s data sits in the same database as its neighbors’. Most companies haven’t looked at their own record the way an outsider could.
Your suppliers’ risk is already your risk. EHS performance and supplier reliability are more linked than most companies realize. We’ll look at how to build resilience along the way and avoid the disruption and brand impacts when vendor risks can turn into real supplier problems.
Questions or topics worth covering? Reach out: doug@ecolumix.com
