What They Did: A Chlorine Plant That Ignored Its Own Danger

Online Packaging, Inc. makes bleach. To do that, it uses chlorine gas, which is classified by the federal government as a regulated toxic substance with a threshold quantity of 2,500 pounds because an accidental release can cause mass casualties. The company stores it in industrial railcars at 124 Tri Quad Dr, Michigan City, Indiana.

• The facility maintains more than the federal 2,500-pound threshold of chlorine in its process, which legally triggers a Program 3 Risk Management Plan, the most rigorous safety tier under the Clean Air Act’s Chemical Accident Prevention Provisions.
• Program 3 applies because the process is also covered by the OSHA process safety management standard, which kicks in when chlorine exceeds 1,500 pounds. Online Packaging exceeds both thresholds simultaneously.
• A worst-case chlorine release scenario models a toxic plume that reaches beyond the facility fence line to public receptors: residences, schools, hospitals, parks. This is not a theoretical concern. It is the federally-modeled outcome documented in the company’s own Risk Management Plan filing.
• At some point before the August 2021 inspection, the company began storing a second railcar of chlorine on-site during high-demand season, effectively doubling its maximum chlorine inventory. It told no regulator. It updated no safety plan. It informed no emergency responder.
• When EPA Region 5 inspectors showed up on August 10, 2021, they found a facility operating a deadly chemical process with fabricated paperwork, missing procedures, untrained workers, and equipment that had never been properly inspected or maintained.

The Violation Breakdown: Every Single Way They Failed

EPA inspectors documented violations in eleven distinct regulatory categories on a single inspection day, August 10, 2021. Each category below represents a federal legal requirement that exists precisely because chlorine gas accidents kill people.

1. Hazard Assessment: The Hidden Second Railcar

• Before 2021, the facility stored one railcar of chlorine. Then it began receiving a second during high-demand seasons, doubling the maximum on-site chlorine inventory. This is a material change to any hazard calculation.
• Federal regulations require that when a second covered process potentially affects different public receptors than the first scenario, a separate worst-case release analysis must be filed. Online Packaging never filed one for the second railcar.
• The company’s Risk Management Plan, last updated June 13, 2017, remained frozen at a single-railcar scenario even as the physical reality on the ground changed.

2. Process Safety Information (PSI): The Paper That Didn’t Exist

• There was no design plate on the bleach reactor. The reactor and bleach make tank were unlabeled. The chlorine pipeline connecting the railcar to the process was only color-coded, with no written labels identifying what it carries or its hazard rating.
• The documented maximum intended inventory was wrong: it listed capacity for one railcar while the facility was regularly storing two.
• Safe operating limits (temperature, pressure, flow, composition) for process equipment were not documented anywhere in the PSI files.
• Nobody had evaluated or written down what would happen if the process deviated from normal parameters. The consequences of deviation section was simply absent.
• Construction materials for the equipment were not documented. Relief system design, design basis, and ventilation system design records lacked the engineering calculations required by law.

3. Process Hazard Analysis (PHA): The Safety Review That Wasn’t

• The PHA the company submitted to inspectors was a What-if Worksheet. That worksheet did not address chlorine storage or the railcar unloading process at all, which is the highest-risk activity at the entire facility.
• The analysis skipped four required elements: consequences of engineering and administrative control failures, facility siting evaluation, human factors assessment, and a qualitative safety health effects evaluation.
• The PHA worksheets contained no names of who prepared them and no identification of whether those people were even qualified to conduct such an analysis.
• When inspectors asked for the original, initial PHA for the life of the process, Online Packaging could not produce it. They no longer had it, or it never existed.

4. Operating Procedures: No Instructions for When Things Go Wrong

• The company had no written operating procedures for unloading chlorine from the railcar covering temporary operations, emergency shutdown, emergency operations, or startup after an emergency shutdown or turnaround. These are the exact moments when a chlorine accident is most likely to occur.
• There were no written procedures addressing operating limits or safety and health considerations for the railcar chlorine unloading process.
• Procedures are supposed to be certified annually as current and accurate. Instead, inspectors were told procedures are only reviewed when changes are made. The annual certification had not been done.

5. Training: Workers Running Chlorine Equipment With No Refreshers

• Federal law requires refresher safety training at least every three years for employees operating covered chemical processes. Online Packaging confirmed to inspectors, twice, that operators receive only initial training and nothing after that.
• At least one operator had been working with the chlorine process for more than three years without any refresher training, placing that worker in direct violation coverage.
• Training records showed what was covered in initial training but provided no verification that workers actually understood the material. There was no documented comprehension check of any kind.

6. Mechanical Integrity: A 20-Year-Old Chlorine System With Zero Preventive Maintenance

• Personnel told inspectors no preventive maintenance is performed on either the bleach manufacturing equipment or the chlorine pipeline feeding the process. Zero. None.
• The bleach manufacturing process is 20 years old. The company’s stated reason for skipping maintenance: “It has been working without any problems.”
• Chlorine hoses connecting railcars are visually inspected only when hooked up. No scheduled inspection regime. No frequency standard. No documentation of findings.
• The chlorine sensors are “self-calibrated.” No external calibration or independent test is conducted on these sensors, which are the facility’s primary warning system for a toxic release.
• The expansion chamber, a critical pressure management component, is neither tested nor inspected.

7. Management of Change: Doubling Chlorine Storage, Telling Nobody

• When the facility started storing a second railcar, it was required to update its process safety information and operating procedures to reflect the new reality. It did neither.
• A formal Management of Change process exists precisely so that when a facility increases its hazard load, every downstream document, every procedure, every trained worker knows about it. That process was bypassed entirely.

8. Compliance Audits: Checking Boxes, Filing Nothing

• The company used a Self-Audit Checklist for its compliance review, which is acceptable. But it never produced a written report from that audit, which is mandatory.
• Without a written report, there is no documented response to findings, no record of what deficiencies were identified, and no proof that any of those deficiencies were corrected.

9. Employee Participation: Workers Cut Out of Their Own Safety

• Federal law requires that employees be consulted on process hazard analyses and on safety management plans. Inspectors were told that not every employee was consulted on the PHA or on how often refresher training should occur.

10. Emergency Response Coordination: Local First Responders Left in the Dark

• Online Packaging is a non-responding stationary source, meaning its employees will not handle a chlorine release themselves. That classification legally requires annual coordination with local emergency planning and response organizations. No such coordination had occurred.
• Local emergency planners were never given the facility’s emergency action plan, emergency contact information, or the information they would need to respond to a chlorine release at this address. If a release happened, first responders would be going in blind.

11. RMP Registration: Lying on the Federal Form

• The facility’s official federal Risk Management Plan registration listed a maximum chlorine quantity based on one railcar. During peak season, two railcars were on-site. The federal form was therefore inaccurate for the facility’s actual operating conditions.

What Numbers Can’t Account For

Chlorine gas was used as a weapon in World War I. That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It is the historical fact that prompted international bans and the same chemical classifications that govern facilities like this one today. When it escapes containment, it reacts with the moisture in your lungs and forms hydrochloric acid. You drown in your own body.

The people who live nearest to 124 Tri Quad Dr in Michigan City, Indiana did not choose to live downwind of a plant storing multiple industrial railcars of chlorine. They almost certainly do not know what Program 3 Risk Management Plan compliance means, or that the facility next to them was running a 20-year-old chlorine system with zero preventive maintenance. They were not consulted. They were not warned. The emergency response coordination that would have armed their local fire and hazmat teams with basic information about the plant, its layout, its contacts, and its danger levels? That was never done. If a pipe failed, if a hose connection let go, if any one of the dozen systems running without proper inspection finally gave out, the people who would die first are the ones who had the least information and the least power to protect themselves.

There are workers inside that facility too. At least one of them was operating a process involving federal-threshold quantities of chlorine gas for more than three years without a single refresher safety training session. They were told, presumably, what to do when they were hired. Then the company decided that was enough. Nobody verified that they still remembered. Nobody checked whether they understood it in the first place, because the verification records were also missing. These workers are not executives. They are hourly people doing a job. They deserved to know what to do if something went wrong. The company decided the cost of training them again wasn’t worth it.

The compliance audit is a particular kind of insult. The company filled out a checklist. It identified findings. Then it wrote no report, documented no response, and kept no record of whether anything was fixed. That is the performance of safety without the substance of it. It exists to protect the company from liability, not to protect the workers or the neighborhood from chlorine gas.

What is $88,383 worth to the people of Michigan City? It is roughly what a middle-class American family earns in two years. It is the cost of not doing any of this. Not the training. Not the documentation. Not the annual emergency coordination call with the fire department. Not the annual certification of operating procedures. Not the maintenance on the pipeline. For less than the cost of a modest house, Online Packaging’s CEO signed his name and walked away.

Straight From the Document: What They Admitted

Every quote below is pulled verbatim from EPA Docket No. CAA-05-2024-0005. Online Packaging neither admits nor denies the factual allegations but consented to the order and the penalty.

“Personnel told EPA inspectors the following information about maintenance on the Process: No preventive maintenance is performed on the equipment associated with the bleach manufacturing and the chlorine pipeline feeding the process. The bleach manufacturing process is 20 years old. It has been working without any problems.” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraph 74(a)–(b)

• This statement proves the company’s maintenance policy is based on absence of visible catastrophe, not on engineering standards or manufacturer requirements. “No problems so far” is not a maintenance program for a chlorine system.
• The 20-year age of the process is significant. Regulatory requirements mandate inspection frequencies consistent with manufacturers’ recommendations and good engineering practices. Those requirements do not contain a “still seems fine” exemption.
• This admission was made directly to federal inspectors, on the record, and it confirms a complete absence of the written maintenance procedures required by 40 C.F.R. § 68.73(b).

“During the inspection, Personnel informed EPA inspectors that operating procedures are only reviewed when changes are made to them. Online Packaging failed to certify that the operating procedures are current and accurate on an annual basis, in violation of 40 C.F.R. § 68.69(c).” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraph 69

• This confirms the company had a policy of reactive procedure review rather than the mandatory annual certification. This distinction matters: annual certification forces a company to actively verify its procedures still match actual practice, catching drift before it causes accidents.
• The fact that personnel stated this as a matter of course suggests it was not an oversight but an established, known practice within the company.

“Online Packaging stated twice that operators only receive initial training for operating the Process. Further, EPA inspectors obtained evidence that at least one of the operators has been working with the Process for greater than three years, which would require refresher training.” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraph 70

• Saying it twice to federal inspectors is not a slip. It is a statement of company policy. The company was confirming, on the record, that it had a deliberate practice of one-and-done training for workers handling a regulated toxic substance.
• The corroborating evidence of a three-plus-year operator without refresher training converts a stated policy into a documented instance of harm, creating a paper trail for future enforcement if violations recur.

“Personnel informed EPA inspectors that the Facility is a non-responding stationary source and that Online Packaging had not performed the annual emergency response coordination activities required under 40 C.F.R. § 68.93.” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraph 85

• A non-responding source is one whose employees will not handle a chlorine release themselves. That classification makes annual coordination with local emergency planning organizations more critical, not less, because outside first responders will be the ones entering a potentially lethal scene.
• The admission that this coordination had not occurred means local fire and hazmat teams were operating without accurate facility information, without updated contacts, and without the emergency planning data they are legally entitled to have.

“In 2021 the facility started to receive an additional railcar of chlorine to be on standby during the high-demand season, for a total of two railcars of chlorine on-site. The Facility failed to analyze and report in the RMP an additional worst-case release scenario from the second railcar that potentially affects public receptors different from those potentially affected by the worst-case release scenario that was reported in the Facility’s June 13, 2017 RMP.” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraphs 58–59

• This confirms that doubling the on-site chlorine inventory was a deliberate operational decision. The failure to update the Risk Management Plan was therefore not an administrative oversight; it was a known change that was never processed through any required safety review channel.
• The phrase “potentially affects public receptors different from those potentially affected” by the existing scenario means a second catastrophic release plume could reach neighborhoods that the existing RMP did not even model as being at risk.
• The 2017 RMP was nearly four years out of date at the time of inspection, operating as the legal record for a facility that had materially changed its hazard profile.

“Personnel informed EPA inspectors that not every employee was consulted on the development of the PHA and the frequency of refresher training.” CAA-05-2024-0005, Paragraph 83

• Employee participation in process hazard analysis is not a courtesy requirement. It exists because workers closest to the process have direct knowledge of how it behaves in practice, knowledge that engineers and managers writing documents from offices may lack.
• Cutting workers out of their own safety plan means the safety plan is built on incomplete information and that the people most at risk have no formal voice in the decisions that govern their survival at work.

Who Pays When a Chlorine Plant Cuts Corners

Public Health

The documented violations at this facility created a specific, measurable increase in the probability that a chlorine release would occur and that, if it did, the damage would be worse than it needed to be.

• A worst-case chlorine release from this facility, by its own federal modeling, reaches public receptors: residences, schools, hospitals, and parks. The second railcar was never modeled, meaning the updated worst-case scenario for doubled inventory was never assessed, leaving the actual danger zone unknown.
• Workers at the facility operated chlorine-handling equipment for years without documented refresher training or comprehension verification. Operator error during chlorine unloading from a railcar is one of the most common causes of industrial chlorine releases.
• The chlorine sensors, the facility’s early warning system for a toxic gas release, were never independently tested or calibrated beyond their self-calibration function. A sensor that fails to alarm is functionally identical to having no sensor.
• The expansion chamber, a component designed to manage pressure anomalies in the chlorine system, was never tested or inspected. Pressure system failures are a primary mechanism for uncontrolled chemical releases.
• Local emergency planning organizations were never given the facility’s emergency contact information, emergency action plan, or hazard data. A response to a chlorine leak at this address would have required first responders to obtain basic facility information in real time, during the emergency itself, increasing exposure time and response delays for anyone caught in a release.
• There were no written procedures for emergency shutdown or emergency operations during chlorine railcar unloading. Workers encountering an incident during unloading had no documented protocol to follow.

Economic Inequality

The geography of industrial chemical hazards is not random. Facilities like this one are disproportionately located in lower-income communities and communities of color. The residents nearest to these facilities bear the physical risk; they do not share in the profits.

• The maximum civil penalty available under the Clean Air Act for these violations was $460,926. The settled penalty was $88,383, representing 19 cents on the dollar. The EPA credited the company for cooperation and “prompt return to compliance,” meaning the discount for behaving well after getting caught is built into the system.
• The civil penalty is explicitly not tax-deductible for federal purposes under this agreement. But the costs of the underlying violations, the years of skipped training, skipped maintenance, and skipped documentation, were almost certainly treated as business savings that reduced taxable income before the EPA ever showed up.
• Workers at this facility, the people physically closest to the chlorine process, were cut out of their own hazard analysis. They had no formal input on training frequency or safety planning. The people with the most to lose from a chlorine release had the least institutional power to prevent one.
• An $88,383 fine spread across the years of non-compliance documented in this case works out to a small annual cost of doing business. For a company operating an industrial bleach manufacturing facility, that math creates a perverse incentive: ongoing safety violations may cost less than ongoing compliance.

What the Penalty Actually Means

What You Can Do About It

Online Packaging, Inc. and its CEO, Roger Teske, have certified in the settlement that the company is now in full compliance with CAPP. That certification is unverified by any public third party. These are the bodies with the authority to check that claim and to act if they find otherwise.

Watchlist: Who Has Jurisdiction

• EPA Region 5 (Chicago) • Air Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Branch • Responsible for CAA/RMP enforcement in Indiana. Contact: R5airenforcement@epa.gov. This is the office that brought this action and the office that would investigate any future violations.
• U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) • The facility’s chlorine process exceeds the OSHA PSM threshold of 1,500 pounds. OSHA has independent jurisdiction to inspect for process safety management compliance and worker safety violations documented in this case, including training failures and missing procedures.
• Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) • State-level environmental regulator with authority over Indiana facilities. State enforcement can run concurrent with federal action and may have additional remedies available under Indiana law.
• LaPorte County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) • The facility is located in Michigan City, LaPorte County. The LEPC is the local body that was legally entitled to receive emergency response information from this facility. They have standing to demand that coordination now occurs and that it is documented going forward.
• U.S. Department of Justice • The settlement preserves the EPA’s and the DOJ’s right to pursue injunctive relief or criminal sanctions for any violation of law. If compliance certification proves false, criminal referral remains an available tool.

On-the-Ground Action for Michigan City Residents

• Request the current Risk Management Plan (RMP) for Online Packaging, Inc. at 124 Tri Quad Dr, Michigan City, Indiana directly from EPA’s RMP database. RMPs are public documents. Read whether the second railcar is now properly documented.
• Contact the LaPorte County LEPC and ask whether they have now received the emergency response information, emergency action plan, and contact information from this facility that was legally required and never provided. Their response will tell you whether the company followed through after the settlement.
• Connect with your local fire department and hazmat team. Ask whether they have received updated facility information from Online Packaging. Firefighters going into a chlorine incident need accurate data. They deserve to know if they have it.
• Share this settlement document with neighbors living near the facility. The settlement is a public document; it was filed with the EPA Regional Hearing Clerk on August 9, 2024. The people most at risk from a chlorine release are the ones who should know this case exists.
• Support community organizing in Michigan City focused on industrial accountability. Groups working on environmental justice in northwestern Indiana can use this settlement as documented evidence of how industrial facilities manage, or fail to manage, chemical hazards in their neighborhoods.
• File a complaint with EPA Region 5 if you have reason to believe the facility is not in compliance with the CAPP requirements it certified to. The docket number for any follow-up citation would reference this settlement: Docket No. CAA-05-2024-0005.