How We Track
A petrochemical incident happens in the US once every 10 hours. Here is where that number comes from, what it counts, what it misses, and how to get the data yourself.
Material Research helps Beyond Petrochemicals and its partners maintain the incident record behind Spill Tracker. They are a research contractor to Beyond Petrochemicals and conduct both retrospective analysis of petrochemical incidents and maintain weekly tracking. Spill Tracker publishes from their feed.
The record currently holds about 3,033 incidents.
Three streams provide our information:
Government and agency records, as well as state and federal filings, emergency notices, and public reports.
Media reports, including local and national coverage. Every incident on the site links to the article it came from.
Community reports. What residents tell us they saw, confirmed before being displayed.
Material Research monitors all US states and regions.
Texas, Louisiana, and the Ohio River Valley get the closest attention. That is where petrochemical production concentrates, and it is where the count runs highest.
An incident is defined as an unplanned or reportable event at a petrochemical facility, or in the transport of petrochemicals, that releases material or causes a fire, an explosion, or an evacuation.
Six types of incidents show up most: flares, ammonia releases, rail derailments, spills, fires, and daily releases.
3,033 recorded incidents, spread across incidents logged since 2023, works out to one every 10 hours.
The count is cumulative and it backdates. When an older incident is confirmed after the fact, it enters the record at the date it happened, so totals for earlier periods can go up.
The figure on this site is refreshed monthly.
This number is a floor, not a ceiling.
Most incidents don’t make the news, and releases that fall below the level the state requires to be reported often never enter any official record. They are also the ones people at the fence line see most: the flare that runs all night, the release nobody announced, etc.
When somebody who lives there tells us what they watched happen, that is not a story on top of the data. It is a correction to it once the incident is confirmed.
Incident feed: weekly.
Map: as incidents are reported and verified.
Trend math: once a quarter.
Open the Data
The full incident record is a view-only spreadsheet, sorted by geography. Please provide the following information to request access.
Tell Us What You Saw
If you watched an incident happen where you live, you can add it to the record. Reports go to the Beyond Petrochemicals team and get checked the same way every other incident does.