MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A recent fire at a BioLab facility in suburban Atlanta is raising questions about why one of the chemicals stored in the facility isn't more regulated. The blaze caused a chlorine smell. Seventeen thousand people near the facility had to be evacuated, and more than 70,000 others were in lockdown for several days. Marisa Mecke with member station WABE in Atlanta has been following the story, and she's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning.
MARISA MECKE, BYLINE: Good morning. Thanks for having...
MARTIN: Thanks for coming. Do we know yet how the fire on the roof of the building got started?
MECKE: It's still not exactly clear. What we do know is that water got into the facility that's storing the chemical, TCCA, which is used to make, like, pool and spa products. But it's highly reactive, and it catches on fire when it comes into contact with water. What we don't know is whether this water had seeped in from Hurricane Helene or a sprinkler system malfunctioned because there was a small fire on the roof that firefighters had previously extinguished that morning, or if it was some combination of both.
MARTIN: So I understand that people smelled it all over Atlanta and that EPA and local officials tested the air around the metro area and that they found the chemical levels were supposedly unlikely to cause harm to, quote-unquote, "most people," which I can imagine was kind of worrying. But has the company said anything about all this?
MECKE: The company BioLab and its parent company, KIK Consumer Products, haven't said all that much. They have offered publicly to reimburse residents for hotel rooms while they were displaced. Their community liaison, Dexter Porter, did show up for a press conference last week, and here's what he had to say.
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DEXTER PORTER: I would like to say we're sorry this event happened in the community, and we're doing everything possibly to make sure that the community is safe.
MECKE: And this isn't the first incident that the chemical company BioLab has had. You know, they've had a big one in 2020 in Louisiana, similar to what happened in Georgia. And the facility here in Georgia had three incidents in the last several years, plus some OSHA violations. So this isn't their first, you know, rodeo with the - talking to the public about their incidents.
MARTIN: Tell us a bit more about the chemical itself and how it's regulated.
MECKE: So a group of Georgia lawmakers is trying to up the regulation of this chemical with the EPA. You know, it has a lot of regulations already at the state and at the federal level, but they're hoping to put it on the EPA's risk management program. And this would require the facility to have more thorough plans to prevent chemical accidents like what happened here in Georgia and a better emergency response plan. This case in Georgia, it took several hours to alert nearby residents of the accident, and the different messages Atlantans were getting from different agencies caused a lot of confusion on the ground. And people just want companies like BioLab to be more prepared and for the EPA to communicate more effectively.
MARTIN: So are there any lawsuits connected to this?
MECKE: Yeah. So we're still seeing a bunch of those kind of start coming through. There's already a couple of class action lawsuits in the work. Some of those are suing on the behalf of the residents' health, you know, kind of environmental health impacts, and others are suing for businesses that had to close during the fire and, you know, had losses. And the state is still investigating the incident, so there could still be room for permit violations and for fines associated with that.
MARTIN: That is Marisa Mecke with WABE in Atlanta. Marisa, thank you.
MECKE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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