Photo: Smoke from the Biolab facility chemical fire. Credit: Screenshot from 6abcPhiladelphia
On Sunday, Sept. 29, a chemical fire at a Georgia BioLab facility exposed 17,000 people to toxic chemicals such as chlorine. Social media videos captured huge, thick clouds of smoke billowing over major highways as thousands of cars drove past. This is the third time that an occurrence like this has happened in the last seven years at the BioLab facility in Conyers, a suburb located east of Atlanta.
The fire started that day, around 5:30 a.m. It was caused by a sprinkler head malfunction, which caused water to come in contact with a water-reactive chemical, producing the plume and a small roof fire. This soon progressed to a massive smoke cloud, visible from the airport 30 miles away.
But one sprinkler head malfunction does not tell the whole story. This is not the only time that the BioLab Facility in Conyers has exploded. Government officials and corporate media also continue to lie to and neglect people in range of the blast, providing little to no plans for evacuation or safety.
Corporate media and government officials lied about evacuating 17,000 people!
The day of the explosion, local and national media outlets reported that 17,000 people were evacuated out of Conyers. Sheriffs claimed that they knocked on doors to get people out of the blast zone. The local news mentioned several evacuation centers in surrounding counties.
On Monday, Sept. 30, PSL organizers visited three designated “evacuation sites” and found them to be nearly empty. One site, Wolverine Gym in Covington, which sat empty, had a paper sign hastily taped to the door instructing evacuees to move to a scout camp 30 minutes out, which also sat nearly empty.
Outside the camp, our members talked to two men who were looking for an evacuation site. One of them, Reed Carr said, “You’d read on the news that said we’d had 17,000, 19,000 refugees, like heading towards this way to seek refuge. But then you just weren’t really getting the feeling that that was actually true by the way that people were not leaving.”
Meanwhile, there are no barricades to stop people from going near the blast site, no assistance to help people evacuate from out of the blast site. Steven Singleton described the scene as he left Conyers: “We turned around in a little apartment complex and there were people out there outside like it was nothing. Nobody’s telling them to stay inside. They literally had chlorine, flakes falling from the sky in their backyard.”
Just like with Hurricane Helene, the local and national government has left the people of Conyers —and much of the Atlanta metro — to fend for themselves.
Since the blast, low hanging and stagnant chlorine particles will be pushed into surrounding counties in the Eastern portion of Gwinnett and Walton county in the coming days. All over east Atlanta, fog envelopes the air and residents described smelling chlorine as they stepped outside. Despite this, residents described only receiving any notification from the city government, hours after already smelling the chlorine in the air Monday morning.
Shut BioLab down!
This is not the first time a fire of this magnitude erupted at BioLab, a producer of pool and lab products. BioLab is a subsidiary of KIK Consumer Products, whose revenue spiked at $1.2 billion in 2023. Yet it continues practices that lead to catastrophic explosions, evacuations, and pollution.
A September 2020 reaction and decomposition with the chemical TCCA caused a plume of hazardous chemicals to be released into the air at the Conyers plant. Workers and nine firefighters were exposed to “dangerous fumes,” according to a U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board report. Businesses were evacuated and a section of I-20 was closed.
A 2020 report on two fires at separate BioLab locations by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board found that “The building [in Conyers, GA] was not equipped with an automated water detector or alarm system to alert employees of a water leak.”
That same year, Hurricane Laura knocked out a Westlake, Louisiana BioLab facility. The report found that BioLab was extremely unprepared for the impacts of Hurricane Laura despite going through a similar situation during a 2017 storm. It also found BioLab was not following the necessary guidelines to protect its chemicals during storms like Laura.
After this storm, BioLab laid off 100 of its employees.
BioLab rebuilt and expanded with a $16.7 million tax break rewarded by the Louisiana Board of Commerce and Industry in 2022. A Chlorine leak occurred almost immediately after, in March 2023. Reports found that since Hurricane Laura, only 12 of the 33 alert sirens were working to notify workers of these leaks.
What we’ve seen from BioLab consistently is a complete lack of concern for the safety of its workers, the surrounding communities, or the planet. Catastrophic fires like these are preventable, they shouldn’t be routine every few years. It is only because of the conscious choices of these billion-dollar companies that whole cities are evacuated and air and water supplies are polluted. And situations like these are not unique to Conyers or BioLab. Back in February 2023, the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio exposed residents to severe hazardous materials which continue to impact their health to this day. This was also an avoidable disaster, the result, among many factors, of Norfolk Southern’s insistence on using the outdated DOT-111 tank car and severely overworking their workers.
In another example, a landfill in Alabama caught fire in 2023 as well. The supposedly “green” landfill had been accepting hazardous material such as old tires, asphalt waste and various construction debris, all of which is toxic to burn. The resulting fire leaked “forever chemicals,” linked to illness and birth defects, into the local water supply.
At the end of the day, this BioLab explosion is not just a Conyers problem. It is not just a Georgia problem or a Louisiana problem. This is a problem of the capitalist system that puts profits over people.
This is the reason that despite exploding multiple times, across multiple locations, BioLab has not been shut down. At most, BioLab has just been fined to the the tune thousands of dollars for a billion dollar corporation or has in fact been given tax breaks in order to rebuild, but not actually improve their facilities.
Local governments have rewarded BioLab for exposing nearby residents and workers to toxic chemicals. This is why BioLab must be shut down.
But we can’t just stop at shutting down BioLab, but we must fight for a system that ensures that there are stronger regulations in place for facilities that carry toxic chemicals like these.
We need to make sure that these facilities are away from our working-class communities, they are regulated and they are nationalized so they can be held to account by the people living nearby and the people working there.
A system that ensures safety, accountability, and that something like this will never happen again would be a socialist system.
This is why from Conyers to Lake Charles to East Palestine we must fight for a better system for ourselves and our planet to live.
