Where does this information come from?

This map includes only the publicly available and non-confidential portions of Risk Management Plans submitted by chemical companies to the EPA as part of compliance with the Risk Management Program (RMP) under the Clean Air Act. This data was previously available on EPA’s website from March 2024 to April 18, 2025, and was obtained by the Data Liberation Project. The dataset displayed here includes submissions received by July 6, 2025, and may not reflect all incidents that occurred within the last five years.

What is the Risk Management Program (RMP)?

The Risk Management Program (RMP), administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act, is intended to prevent disasters and releases at high-risk chemical facilities by establishing response and prevention programs. It was enacted by Congress in 1990 following the 1984 pesticide gas disaster that has since injured or killed over a half million people in Bhopal, India to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the United States.

The EPA 2024 RMP rule requires that high-risk chemical facilities develop a plan to 1) assess the potential effects of a chemical incident, 2) identify steps the facility is taking to prevent an incident, and 3) identify emergency response procedures should an incident occur. Facilities have to submit updated RMP plans to the EPA at least every five years and report any incidents that have occurred since their last plan.

The RMP rule regulates around 12,000 high-risk facilities that manufacture, use and stockpile highly hazardous chemicals such as those used in oil refineries, chemical plants, paper mills, food processing, water treatment, agriculture (pesticides, fertilizers and the intermediary chemicals used to make the final product), plastics and other products. Fenceline communities neighboring these facilities are disproportionately Black, Latino and low-income and are impacted not only by chemical emissions from these facilities, but also many non-chemical stressors (such as socioeconomic factors) and ongoing chemical disasters from these facilities.

Which facilities or processes are regulated under the RMP rule?

If a facility includes a process unit that makes, uses or stores a certain amount of a regulated substance/chemical (see here), that process is subject to complying with the RMP rule. To be clear, the entire facility is not regulated under the RMP, only the processes that meet the chemical and quantity thresholds.

What does it mean to be an RMP facility for the purposes of this tool?

A facility is listed as an RMP facility on this map if it submitted a Risk Management Plan to the EPA before April 3, 2025 in compliance with the RMP rule since the RMP was established in 1990.

The information in this section is drawn from “What’s in the database?” by the Data Liberation Project, an organization that requests RMP data from the federal government periodically and posts it for public access.

The best way to understand what’s in the database is to read the EPA’s user guide for facilities submitting RMPs. It walks through each section, field, and value, and will give you a sense of what the data-entry process looks like. The database is oriented around the concept of the RMP submission. Here’s a broad overview of what an RMP submission contains, going section by section:

What information is included on a facility’s RMP submission?

Section 1. Registration: This section provides general information about the facility and the submission itself, including the type of submission, facility name, parent company names (majority owner or two largest owners), EPA Facility ID, other EPA identifiers, DUNS numbers, facility address, facility geocoordinates, person responsible for RMP implementation, emergency contact, Local Emergency Planning Committee, number of full-time equivalent employees on site, applicability of other federal safety rules, last safety inspection date/inspector, whether using “predictive filing,” and a list of relevant “processes” (see definition below).

Section 2: Toxics: Worst-Case: This section contains the facility’s assessment of the “worst-case release scenario” for Program 1 processes (see “program” definition below), another for toxic substances in Programs 2 and 3, another for flammable substances in Programs 2 and 3, and potentially additional scenarios depending on the range of potential “public receptors” (see the user guide and/or statute for details). This section focuses on toxic substances. For each scenario, facilities list the process, chemical, chemical state (e.g., gas, liquid), scenario model used, release rate, and a handful of scenario-modeling factors. The EPA has redacted or fully zeroed-out much of the other information in this section, however, including: type of scenario, quantity of chemical released, release duration, distance to “endpoint,” residential population within distance to endpoint, and “public receptors” (e.g., schools, homes, hospitals) and “environmental receptors” (e.g., state parks, wildlife sanctuaries) within distance to endpoint.

Section 3: Toxics: Alternative Release: Alternative release scenarios are those more likely to occur than the “worst-case” scenarios but could still affect the public. Facilities must “present one alternative release scenario for each regulated toxic substance held above the threshold quantity in a Program 2 or 3 process [and] one alternative release scenario to represent all flammable substances held above the threshold quantity in a Program 2 or 3 process.” This section focuses on toxic substances. The information provided by facilities (and EPA redactions) are similar to those in the section above. Also similarly, they are heavily redacted.

Section 4: Flammables: Worst-Case: Similar to Section 2, but for flammable substances, with slight differences. Also similarly, they are heavily redacted.

Section 5: Flammables: Alternative Release: Similar to Section 3, but for flammable substances, with slight differences. Also similarly, they are heavily redacted.

Section 6: Five-Year Accident History: The accident histories listed in the RMPs must include ”all accidental releases from covered processes that resulted in deaths, injuries, or significant property damage on site, or known offsite deaths, injuries, evacuations, sheltering in place, property damage, or environmental damage.” For each such accident in the five years before the RMP submission, this section includes: the date and time the accident began, the duration of the release, the NAICS industry code of the process involved, the chemicals involved, the type of accident (explosion, fire, etc.), source of release, weather conditions, initiating event type, contributing factors, on-site impacts (deaths, injuries, property damage), known offsite impacts, whether offsite responders were notified, changes implemented as a result of the accident, and whether the facility is withholding any aspect as confidential business information.

Section 7: Prevention Program: Program Level 3: For each Program 3 process (see “program” definition below), and, in some cases, individual units of each process, facilities must provide a variety of information about the steps they’ve taken to prevent accidents, including: the NAICS industrial code for the process, the chemicals involved, the date the safety information was last reviewed, the date and technique of the last “Process Hazard Analysis,” the major hazards identified (e.g., explosion, corrosion, overfilling, earthquakes, hurricanes), process controls in place (e.g., relief valves, keyed bypass systems, automatic shutoffs), mitigation systems in use (e.g., sprinkler systems, blast walls), monitoring systems in use, training programs provided, recent maintenance, recent audits, recent incident investigations, and other compliance-related information.

Section 8: Prevention Program: Program Level 2: Similar to Section 7, but for Program 2 processes, with slight differences.

Section 9: Emergency Response: In this section, facilities provide information about their emergency response plan, mostly in the form of yes/no checkboxes, with the exception of the dates of the most recent emergency response update and training for employees, as well as the name and phone number of the “local agency with which your facility's ER plan or response actions are coordinated.” Facilities that (in addition to meeting other criteria) do not have their employees respond to emergencies are not required to complete this section.

Executive Summary: This is a single, free-text field. As the submission guide explains: “The Executive Summary must include a brief description of your facility's risk management program. You determine the length; it may be as short as two or three pages or, if you have many processes, it may need to be longer. You should view the Executive Summary as an opportunity to communicate in your own words the nature of the risks posed by your facility to your community and to explain what you have done to minimize those risks.“

Additional Resources

• EPA’s List of Chemicals and Threshold Quantities
• Data Liberation Project: EPA RMP Database Documentation
• Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters Incident Tracker
• Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters Website
• Data Liberation Project Website

If you’d like to learn more about the context, background, and methodologies used to collect, organize, and publish this data, please review the original RMP eSubmit User Manual and additional links provided by the Data Liberation Project. These contain deeper insights into the federal data submission process and data transparency efforts.

The website was built with direction and advice by Mathy Stanislaus, Director of The Environmental Collaboratory at Drexel University, based on his experience working with frontline communities in his former role as co-chair of President Obama’s Chemical Plant Task Force — in partnership with the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA), a national network of, by, and for grassroots Environmental and Economic Justice organizations and advocates in communities that are disproportionately impacted by toxic chemicals from legacy contamination, ongoing exposure to polluting facilities, and health-harming chemicals in household products. EJHA is a space for fenceline communities to come together to share their expertise and strategies with one another.

How to use this search tool & map

This tool allows you to search for Risk Management Program (RMP) facility information by entering filter criteria (such as facility name, address, state, city, county, or chemical) and viewing results both as a list and on an interactive map.

Some ways to use this tool include:

• Typing in your home or work address and/or zooming into your area on the map to see what facilities are in your area to better inform and protect yourself and your family in the event of a chemical disaster.
• Searching by your city or county name to see what facilities are in your area and what kinds of hazards they pose, and reaching out to your local government or Local Emergency Planning Committee to ask what emergency prevention or response plans are in place and what you should do in a disaster.
• Searching by a specific name of a facility that you work in or live near and have concerns about.
• Searching in the “Advanced” section by chemical name or NAICS code to find facilities regulated for a specific chemical or industry code.
• Looking at the map to see the frequency of chemical disasters in a given area and clicking on specific incidents to find more information about them.

How does this tool differ from EPA’s former tool?

This tool provides access to the same information that was available in EPA’s previous RMP search tool, but it is updated annually rather than daily. Chemical facilities can revise or update their RMP plans at any time, so data may not always reflect the most recent submissions.

What is considered a “recent accident” for the purpose of this search tool and map?

A “recent accident” is an incident such as an explosion, leak, or other chemical release that was reported by a facility on their last RMP submission to the EPA. Due to the periodic nature of RMP submissions (required at least every five years), there may be a delay in reporting incidents to EPA and therefore incident data for the past five years is incomplete. Facilities are only required to report an incident to the EPA if it involved one or more RMP regulated chemicals that were emitted at levels above the threshold quantity and resulted in deaths, injuries, property damage, or environmental harm.

For additional details on what makes an incident reportable, see “What counts as an accident?” by Data Liberation Project.

In the advanced search feature – What does it mean to search by a specific chemical? Are the results comprehensive?

No, the results are NOT comprehensive.

Just because a facility doesn’t show up when you search by chemical does not mean that the facility does not use, make, or store that chemical. It just means they are not regulated under the RMP for that chemical. The facility could still use or store the chemical at a lower amount than the RMP threshold. When viewing a facility’s details, the chemicals listed are only those regulated under the RMP.