One of Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s last bills could represent the best chance to update the nation’s chemical safety regulations by requiring proof that a chemical is safe before it can be used.

But the legislation is drawing deep skepticism from some environmental groups and state officials who fear it could actually weaken safety standards.

Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who died Monday of viral pneumonia at age 89, worked for decades on environmental legislation, including a 1986 law that created the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, a database that allows members of the public to track pollution.

Lautenberg’s newest proposal, the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, was the product of a compromise with Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana. Introduced May 22, it won the endorsement of nine Senate Republicans, along with the influential American Chemistry Council, a trade group.

 A council spokesman called it “a balanced, comprehensive approach to updating the law, which will give consumers more confidence in the safety of chemicals, while at the same time encouraging innovation, economic growth and job creation by American manufacturers.”

An earlier, stricter chemical safety bill — essentially unchanged from legislation Lautenberg had put forward in each Congress since 2005 — failed to draw Republican support.

Lautenberg’s latest bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, which has not yet scheduled it for a hearing.

Even before the film Erin Brockovich depicted the true-life plight of a California town with poisoned water, state scientist John Morgan was calling claims of a cancer cluster there pure fiction.

For the past 18 years, the Loma Linda University professor, who also works as an epidemiologist for the California Department of Public Health, has tenaciously tried to debunk the notion that families in the desert community of Hinkley were suffering from a high rate of cancer after Pacific Gas & Electric Co. dumped tons of a contaminant into an unlined wastewater pond.

Morgan has kept his research up to date and even today presents it at scientific conferences. His message is not subtle. At a conference in Maryland last year, he popped up one slide comparing Brockovich to a delusional Don Quixote and another mocking the Academy Awards for honoring the film “in spite of the absence of evidence of a cancer excess in Hinkley.”

Morgan doesn’t hide his disapproval of a recent ruling by the California Environmental Protection Agency that drinking hexavalent chromium, the rust inhibitor that PG&E dumped in Hinkley, can cause cancer. The agency based its ruling on rodent studies, but as Morgan says, “We’re not big rats.”

BATON ROUGE, La. — Shirley Bowman noticed the smell after 8 a.m. on June 14, 2012, her 61st birthday. In Baton Rouge, where the petrochemical industry dominates the landscape, foul odors resembling burnt rubber or propane are perennial. But this odor, caustic and potent, seemed especially foul — “like some sort of chemical,” she recalls.

Bowman found her daughter crying over a migraine. Her neighbors experienced headaches, dizziness, nausea. One family reported a toddler son coughing up phlegm; another, an elderly father collapsing on the floor. She soon suspected the cause: A leak of “steam-cracked” naphtha, a liquid mixture of volatile petrochemicals, occurring at the ExxonMobil Baton Rouge petrochemical complex a half mile away.

Four hours earlier, Exxon operators detected an odor in the East area tank field, and discovered a “bleeder” valve on Tank 801 dripping naphtha into a sewer. The leaky valve dumped 411 barrels into the underground system, company records filed with the state show. The liquid traveled a mile before pouring into a separator pit, vaporizing along the way, and releasing tens of thousands of pounds of benzene and other toxic chemicals into the air.

What happened that day in Baton Rouge is one thread of a larger story about the often toxic, sometimes hidden releases emanating from oil refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities along the chemical corridor of Louisiana and Texas. Those unplanned emissions — known in regulatory parlance as “upsets” — are occurring more often than industry admits or government knows, according to more than 50 interviews with regulators, activists, plant representatives, workers and residents, and an analysis of tens of thousands of records by the Center for Public Integrity.

Nothing in the law allows for the invisible danger from “upset” emissions to persist, but legislation and reality often collide.

On the contrary, the federal Clean Air Act was meant to reduce harmful emissions by requiring continuous pollution limits for industrial facilities. But since its passage in 1970, state and federal regulators have created loopholes involving accidental releases — loopholes that have for years been challenged, re-written and bogged down in bureaucracy.

Nearly from the start, regulators began waiving pollution standards when equipment unexpectedly malfunctioned and had to be shut down, started up and maintained.

By 2004, 29 states had devised what University of Texas-Austin researcher Kelly Haragan calls “a flat-out exemption” for such emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency offered similar immunity for those involving hazardous air pollutants.

“There is a big caveat here,” acknowledges Adam Kushner, who headed the EPA’s air enforcement unit until last year. “They didn’t necessarily count against your compliance picture.”

This murkiness began fading after environmental groups sued the EPA in 2003, alleging its exemption violated clean-air laws. By December 2008, a federal court agreed, vacating the language. The agency has lagged at fully closing its loophole; earlier this year, it unveiled a proposed rule that would require facilities in any state to follow pollution limits during periods of start-up, shut down and maintenance.

For anyone anxious about toxic chemicals in the environment, Sunday marked a dubious milestone.

It has been three years since the “chemicals of concern” list landed at the White House Office of Management and Budget. The list, which the Environmental Protection Agency wants to put out for public comment, includes bisphenol A, a chemical used in polycarbonate plastic water bottles and other products; eight phthalates, which are used in flexible plastics; and certain flame-retardant compounds called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs.

The EPA wants to highlight these chemicals because “they may present an unreasonable risk to human health and/or the environment,” the agency says.

But any such listing must first be vetted by the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA.

The EPA proposal arrived at OIRA on May 12, 2010. There it remains — a symbol, some say, of a broken regulatory system.

“It’s far past time for the OMB to conclude its review of the EPA’s proposal to list chemicals of concern,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said in a statement to the Center for Public Integrity. “Americans deserve access to information about the chemicals found in products throughout their homes that might pose a risk to their health.”

In a statement, OMB spokeswoman Ari Isaacman Astles wrote, “The Administration is committed to chemical safety and when it comes to complex safety rules, it is critical that we get them right.”

The Environmental Protection Agency announced new safeguards Friday to prevent conflicts of interest or bias from tainting its science, including efforts to assess the dangers of toxic chemicals.

The reforms, targeting scientific review panels selected for EPA by outside contractors, follow a Center for Public Integrity-PBS NewsHour examination revealing ties between scientists and industry on a panel reviewing hexavalent chromium, a compound commonly found in drinking water that may cause cancer.

In that case, three panelists who urged the EPA to delay potentially stricter drinking water standards had been expert witnesses for industry in hexavalent chromium litigation. The scientists denied any conflict and said their input was based on research, but the case study revealed how the EPA is unaware of potential conflicts on its own panels.

Under its own process, the Center reported, the agency turns over the job of selecting panelists to private companies, which handle conflict-of-interest reviews in secret. All information the vendors collect, including financial disclosure forms, is “considered private and non-disclosable to EPA or outside entities except as required by law,” the EPA policy says.

The changes announced Friday add more layers of review — and provide more public disclosure — to the process.

Environmental watchdogs, who had questioned EPA's existing process, say the steps are overdue.

“It brings transparency to a process that wasn’t there before,” said Francesca Grifo, a senior policy fellow and expert on scientific integrity at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — The woman who helped free an entire community from a toxic dump, literally rewriting environmental laws in the process, was so shy at the start of the struggle she tried to hide behind a tree when neighbors called on her.

Lois Gibbs took to the stage that day 35 years ago, in the seemingly idyllic community of Love Canal, N.Y., and began to find her voice. Transforming herself from homemaker to hell-raiser, she helped convince then-President Jimmy Carter to come to town in 1980 and remove 900 families from a 21,000-ton toxic dump. Earlier that year, Gibbs and her neighbors held two Environmental Protection Agency officials captive in a ploy to get the president’s attention. It worked.

Long before Erin Brockovich became a movie, Gibbs helped secure an environmental victory of greater heft. Love Canal’s war against the toxins under its feet prompted the federal government to create the Superfund cleanup program and earned Gibbs the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Today she is still in the fight as executive director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a nonprofit squired in a third-floor corner office in a nondescript building in Fairfax County, Va., a few miles from Washington, D.C. A tiny gray sign hangs outside the door, betraying no sense of the history inside.

BELLE ROSE, La. — Tim Brown eases his john boat from his back yard dock into his daily therapy: The Bayou Corne that courses through this patch of southern Louisiana like a lifeline. Brown powers past the Tupelo Gum, Cypress Moss and Swamp Maple trees that drape the bayou in a frame, and steers to the spot where he reels catfish and collects thoughts.

“If I had to actually leave this place and go back to a house on dry land, I’d probably be dead in two years,” says Brown, 65 and retiring next year. “I guess you can say it’s a totally different life out here.”

But now that life, for Brown and 350 other residents in a neighborhood with “Crawfish Crossing” signs and roads named Gumbo, Jambalaya and Crawfish Stew Street, has been shattered by discovery of a 14-acre sinkhole that fractured the community’s calm and may bury its dreams.

The sinkhole, triggered by a collapsed cavern operated by salt mining operator Texas Brine Company LLC, swallowed trees and fouled the air when it appeared August 3. Its discovery sent the Bayou Corne community here in Belle Rose into a state of emergency: Assumption Parish and Louisiana officials ordered a still-in-effect evacuation as state officials scrambled to unearth what happened.

“Initially the concern was, that first day, you have a sinkhole … and you don’t know what caused it. All you know is a 400-by-400 section of marshland just got converted to a muddy pit. Trees were sinking into it and not coming back. It was like quicksand,” said Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources.