"Accident at DuPont Puts Plant in Spotlight"

"DuPont Co. ’s chemical plant in La Porte, Texas, for many years has gained a strong reputation among industrial-safety experts for migrating to safer chemicals. DuPont itself is widely credited with helping to invent safe handling procedures for chemicals that have been adopted throughout the industry.

So when a gas leak at the plant earlier this month caused four employees—two of them brothers—to be fatally overcome by an industrial chemical called methyl mercaptan, some in the chemical safety world were taken aback. But records from Texas courts, state environmental agencies and federal environmental and safety agencies paint a more complex story.

'The minute you would say DuPont La Porte, it would be an example of good safety practices,' said Daniel Horowitz, managing director of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which is investigating the accident. 'Certainly it’s an education for me. It’s an old plant and this shows that by cherry picking a random example'—that is, the La Porte plant—'you could miss a lot of problems.'"

Alexandra Berzon reports for the Wall Street Journal November 23, 2014.