alt Hacker NewsThe plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
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The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.
> I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
It's par for the course of many US companies and likely others outside the US. I have been in a lot of manufacturing/industrial facilities and find a lot of machismo coupled with greedy asshole bosses/owners/managers. You wind up with corporate culture of "keep your head down, do as your told, don't question, and get paid."
It leads to a normalization of deviance where you end up with resentful workers who don't give a shit. Then when things go wrong, management can then easily blame them for their crappy work ethic and fire them. Then hire a new person to demoralize in exchange for money. It's a scam really.
The only way to curb that behavior is to hold people responsible but we seem to be incapable of doing that because the people who need to be held responsible have too much money and power.