Two workers were killed and up to 30 injured after a chemical leak at Catalyst Refiners, a silver recovery facility in Institute, West Virginia, on April 22.
According to the county’s Commission Emergency Management Director, the chemical leak occurred as workers were preparing to shut down part of the facility. Analysts believe a violent chemical reaction that took place during a cleaning process caused the leak.
Residents nearby Catalyst Refiners were issued a shelter-in-place order, requiring them to quarantine for over five hours until large-scale decontamination procedures could be implemented.
Catalyst Refiners is owned by Ames Goldsmith, a metals monopoly that owns multiple plants in the region known as “Chemical Valley”. The area is heavily polluted by chemical toxins that are responsible for high rates of illness among the predominantly Black population. Monopolists like Ames Goldsmith relentlessly pursue profits at the expense of workers’ safety, which regularly results in chemical leaks and plant explosions that terrorize and murder workers and residents.
Catalyst Refiners in particular has had a history of safety incidents over the years, including spilling nitric acid twice within a month in 2013, a federal workplace safety violation in 2018, and a leak of over 1,300 pounds of nitric acid into the environment from 2014 to 2024.
The risks posed by plants like Catalyst Refiners are exacerbated by policies that favor monopoly profits over workers, such as statewide deregulation and retraction of federal oversight over chemical plants.
Because of these anti-worker policies and features inherent to monopoly capitalism, chemical plants continue to pose risks to residents even after being shut down, due to degradation and regulatory failures around their decommissioning.
Image: Catalyst Refiners. Credit: West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
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