A fire at a chemical plant in Texas last week occurred on the same day that a new report was released showing how common incidents like this are. The report says that chemical or fossil fuel plant fires and explosions are happening at a rate of nearly ONE PER DAY, and little is being done to stop these atrocities. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mike Papantonio: A fire at a chemical plant in Texas last week occurred on the same day that a new report was released showing how common incidents like this occur all the time. The report says that the chemical or fossil fuel plant fires and explosions are happening at a rate of nearly one every day. Pick this story up. This is an outrageous story.

Farron Cousins: Yeah. We had this massive.

Mike Papantonio: How many times have we done this story? Something blowing up and killing a dozen people.

Farron Cousins: Right. And usually in Texas, honestly, it’s probably one of the oldest stories we’ve been doing here at Ring of Fire.

Mike Papantonio: In Texas. Yeah. Texas is the home of explosions. Right.

Farron Cousins: So last week we have this massive explosion slash fire at a chemical plant to the point where the residents in the city were told, don’t leave your house. There is a shelter in place. Do not walk outside. Do not open your windows because of the toxic fumes coming from this facility here. And so far now, 287 as of us talking right here, by the end of the day it’s gonna be higher than that, 287 of these fires or explosions at chemical plants and fossil fuel plants just this year. So yes, we are averaging one a day. People are dying in these explosions every single day.

Mike Papantonio: It’s so common, Farron, that they’re actually attorney firms and attorney groups, this is all they do. This is such, and you know where most of it is, is in taxes, as you point out. But, okay, so the question then becomes, well, don’t regulators take care of this? Well, what do we see with BP? Alright, BP, we handled that case. In the case we found out that the regulators were being invited to parties with coke, prostitutes. It just went on forever what was happening with the regulators. So they said to BP, you know what, we’re gonna let you get away with what we think is a real danger. Which ended up blowing up and destroyed an entire ecosystem. So we think the regulators are there to help. They’re not. They’re just, all they’re looking for is the next job, Farron. Just like BP. These guys went to work for the fossil fuel industry after they left the regulators.

Farron Cousins: Well, and one of the things too, while you bring up BP is the regulators were so captured by that company and Transocean, that they actually, Transocean would fill out their own inspection reports. Their federal inspection reports.

Mike Papantonio: Yeah, and they’d sign off on it.

Farron Cousins: The inspector would get it would say, okay, let me go over it and pen because they’d write it in pencil and just copy exactly what they had written. And based on what we see, there is no way regulators are actually inspecting these plants when we have an explosion every day.

Mike Papantonio: You would think, oh, well, that’s hyperbole talking about the coke and the prostitution part. It’s not.

Farron Cousins: No, it’s not.

Mike Papantonio: I mean, we got in depositions. They had to talk about this in deposition and these were key regulators. So the point is, if you think that the problem in Texas is gonna be cured by regulators, it’s never gonna be cured by regulators.