Toxic plume: Did government ‘winner’ turn out to be a loser?

The fires are out at the recently incinerated BioLab facility that left large swaths of metro Atlanta paralyzed, but the fallout has only just begun.

Impacted Georgians are demanding answers, and lawyers have already filed class-action suits against BioLab, and a petition calling for BioLab’s closure is making its rounds.

As reports have shown, the recent disaster was just the latest in a series of mistakes at the plant, and in what is sure to infuriate taxpayers, local government provided BioLab subsidies to expand its operations. This is just the most recent example of how government is terrible at picking winners and losers.

For those who haven’t followed the BioLab disaster closely, on the early morning of Sunday September 29, “a fire started on the roof of a BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia. The fire was reignited when water from a malfunctioning sprinkler head ‘came in contact with a water reactive chemical and produced a plume,’” reported USA Today.

What followed was a massive chemical fire—belching out unnatural-looking smoke—and the plume stretched a mile long and could be seen from many miles away. Very quickly, chlorine and other chemicals saturated the air as a noxious cloud loomed large over Rockdale County and began spreading across the metro area. To the credit of emergency officials, they acted swiftly, but the fire was beyond their immediate control.

Officials issued the evacuation order for some 17,000 residents, opened at least three shelters for evacuees, and 90,000 others were placed under a shelter-in-place recommendation. They were instructed to keep their doors and windows shut and not to use their air-conditioning—ensuring that not only were they worried about their well-being, but were also uncomfortable. Poison control has since received hundreds of calls related to chlorine fumes.

Even when the fire died out, chemical reactions at the site continued, which released more fumes in the area. At first, this was limited to much of the metro area east of Atlanta, but then the winds shifted—spreading the noxious fumes westward. Due to this change, myriad Atlantans have since witnessed a chlorine haze, which has an unmistakable scent. It may be years before we know the full economic and health impact of the conflagration.

BioLab has been a staple in Conyers since 1973, and the scope of this fire is apparently unmatched by anything in the company’s past. However, it has a concerning track record, and since the 2000s, the company has come under considerable criticism—and for good reason.

“Authorities responded to incidents at the Conyers plant in 2020, 2016 and 2004, when roads were closed, businesses were evacuated and residents were ordered to shelter in place,” according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 2020 incident was so serious that officials shut down part of Interstate 20 for nearly six hours. What’s more, 11Alive News “uncovered more than a dozen violations reported by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the BioLab facility in Conyers, most of them ‘serious.’” 11Alive also noted, “The EPA reported Clean Air Act violations from BioLab in April 2022 and May 2024. It was also issued a notice of noncompliance with the Clean Water Act in March 2022.”

Given all of this, you’d think the government would have stepped in to address this behavior, but corrective action has evidently been insufficient. Even worse, the government decided to subsidize BioLab. In 2019, BioLab broke ground on a new 275,000 square foot warehouse on its campus, but construction such as this is costly, although it becomes much more affordable when the government provides tax benefits.

“The Rockdale County government and Conyers Rockdale Economic Development Council provided incentives for the project in the form of county property tax abatements for 10 years, based on a sliding scale. School taxes were not abated for the project,” wrote The Rockdale Newton Citizen in 2019.

As I have written before, I am generally not fond of subsidies. Governments are terrible at picking winners and losers, and taxpayers often don’t get a good return on their investment. Rather they appear to be sweetheart deals benefiting well-connected companies. Sometimes they reward businesses with dubious histories.

While accidents can and will happen at any company, it appears that the government is also to blame for the BioLab fallout. As a supporter of free markets and limited government, I believe that government has grown far too large, but it still has important roles to play. When it assumes vast regulatory powers, the government bears larger responsibility for ensuring businesses’ good behavior.

After repeated BioLab incidents, regulators failed to adequately prevent re-occurrences, and the local government even went as far as to reward the company with tax incentives. I fully appreciate everyone’s frustration with this disaster, but remember government helped create it.