Factory Gets OK After Fact, After Explosion

The owner of a Cedar Hill bleach factory won approval for zoning exceptions he needs to move forward with a greener process he had already begun using — but he still needs to win the neighborhood’s trust on safety.

That was the upshot of a public hearing Tuesday at a Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) hearing at City Hall.

In a unanimous 5 – 0 vote to approve a special exception with no conditions, board members gave New Haven Chlor-Alkali the green light to use a greener process of bleach manufacturing at its Welton Street factory — but not before listening to community members’ concerns, and expressing some of their own.

Pressing ahead after a Dec. 22 explosion, New Haven Chlor-Alkali (formerly H. Krevit & Co.) appealed for a special exception for a manufacturing facility in the IH (heavy industrial) zone where its factory is located. The new facility will be used exclusively for the GreenChlor method of bleach production, in which purified water is blended with salt molecules and then electrolyzed, creating sodium hypochlorite or bleach. Currently, Chlor-Alkali relies on the older Powell Process of bleach production, which uses liquid chlorine shipped to New Haven by rail car.

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s meeting (and at the meeting itself), company representatives called the GreenChlor process, which would eliminate the use of ​“100 or more” liquid chlorine-carrying rail cars per year, more cost effective and environmentally sustainable. 

Chlor-Alkali attorneys Marjorie Shansky and Nancy Mendel made clear at the meeting that the plant is not eliminating the Powell Process from its operations, but making it a significantly smaller and seasonally-based process, operating in the summer months only. The Powell Process will never take place in the new GreenChlor wing of facility, they added. At the time of theDec. 22 explosion, factory workers were in fact using the new GreenChlor process — without the necessary permit and zoning permission from the city.

With the special exception granted Tuesday night , Shansky said that the factory will proceed with caution, and make sure its equipment, regulations, and safety measures are up-to-date.

During the public hearing portion of the meeting, six community members expressed mixed support for the exception, returning to safety and transparency as a primary concern. While they want to see the factory’s 70 jobs remain in Cedar Hill, they’re also scared after December’s explosion, which blew out the windows of a nearby property and stopped rail traffic for several hours, neighbors said.

Cedar Hill/East Rock Alder Anna Festa told BZA members that she wants a commitment from Chlor-Alkali to show up at community meetings, adequately communicate safety regulations, and follow BZA and City Plan decisions to the letter. She is open to and even enthusiastic about the GreenChlor process, she said — it just has to be done without cutting corners.

“It [the process] wasn’t safe when the explosion occurred, and we are very fortunate that no one was killed or injured,” she said. ​“I think the last thing residents want to see is this plant shut down.” But, she added, ​“we need plans to warn residents. There were a lot of promises at the meetings [in Cedar Hill and East Rock last month] and we’re going to hold them to it.”

Former State Rep. Bill Dyson, board chair at Cedar Hill’s Leeway independent living facility, said he wants to see the factory thrive and continue to employ area residents. But he also wants ​“some agreement on the safety of our patients.” 

Others said the company’s unpredictable track record and the toxicity of liquid chlorine prevented them from voicing full support for the project.

Reading from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website on the dangers of liquid chlorine, Former neighborhood Alder Justin Elicker asked for the approval of the GreenChlor process and the total cessation of the Powell process, a request echoed in several of the night’s submitted testimonies. He cited failure to comply with city decisions in 2009, 2010 and 2011 (read more below) as a public safety hazard, and suggested that Chlor-Alkali CEO N.C. Murthy and Senior Vice President Thomas Ross need to do more to assure the community that its members are safe.

“This company has a history of saying one thing, and then doing something else,” he said. ​“If they do something wrong, it will have an incredibly damaging impact on the community.”

The BZA did not add any such conditions to their final approval of the exception. BZA member Ben Trachten did ask about potential safety concerns about liquid chlorine.

Murthy assured both Elicker and BZA members that ​“safety is paramount for us.” If one of his employees had been injured or killed in December’s blast, he said, he did not know how he would have talked to the families or coped with the grief himself. 

Submitted by New Haven Chlor-Alkali earlier this year, the request voted on Tuesday night sought permission for the conversion of an existing 20,000 square foot structure approved by the City Plan Commission in 2009 — as a warehouse, and not a manufacturing facility — into a manufacturing facility ​“to house industrial process equipment and materials” for the GreenChlor process of making bleach. As proposed, the process will run 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, with six employees in the plant during each shift. 

While the site was approved as a warehouse, it was already being used, without necessary permits or approvals, for manufacturing. The Dec. 22 explosion — the details of which weren’t communicated to the surrounding neighborhood for six hours—was initially reported as a hydrogen leak, it was later revealed to have been caused by a malfunction in the design of saltwater tanks used to hold and treat wastewater. Tanks for which the plant didn’t have necessary permit from the BZA or City Plan Commission.

Since then, the plant has reverted to bringing chlorine gas by train, an old process that Murthy has said is neither as cost effective nor environmentally solvent as the GreenChlor method.

The explosion follows a 2011 citation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for which the company had to pay a $12,626 penalty and buy $36,056 of emergency response equipment for the fire department. At meetings in both Cedar Hill and East Rock last month, Murthy assured concerned residents that the plant was working on a faster emergency response plan, to avoid a communications delay like the one that happened in December 2016. 

At those community meetings, both Cedar Hill residents and members of city law enforcement said that they don’t want to see the plant close — it would result in the loss of too many jobs. They just don’t want to feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods, either.