The chlorine manufacturing plant that was responsible for last year’s massive chemical fire in Georgia will not be reopening.

BioLab, owner of the Conyers, Georgia, facility, announced the manufacturing plant closure May 15. The plant has been shut down since September 29, 2024, after a fire sent toxic smoke across a 50-mile radius of metro-Atlanta, causing interstate closures, shelter-in-place orders for 90,000 residents, and 17,000 evacuations.

The company, which has multiple U.S. locations, announced the plant closure with the following statement: “Over the last several months, BioLab has continued to make significant progress on cleaning up the Conyers site and has now completed its remediation of the facility affected by the fire.

At the same time, throughout this period, we have remained unable to resume manufacturing operations in Conyers.

After taking steps to meet customer needs through alternative production, and in considering our future business needs carefully, we have made the difficult decision to not restart manufacturing at the Conyers plant.

The Conyers Distribution Center, which was cleared by relevant authorities to reopen in November 2024, will remain operational and will continue to fulfill customer orders for finished products from other manufacturing facilities.

We take our role in Conyers very seriously, and as we move forward, the safety and wellbeing of the Conyers community remain a top priority.”

Biolab’s decision comes amid a wave of lawsuits, numerous government citations against the company, and enormous community backlash.

A month after the fire took place, Rockdale County filed a federal lawsuit against BioLab Inc., KIK International LLC, and KIK Consumer Products Inc. — the parent company of BioLab — alleging

BioLab, Inc. plant located in Conyers, Georgia. Photo credit: Google street view. violations of the Clean Air Act among other charges.

When the fire broke out at the chemical plant, it released a hazardous plume of smoke containing chlorine, chloramines, hydrochloric acid, and other noxious chemicals, which could be seen for more than 30 miles, residents say.

Biolab is also facing actions from multiple law firms that have filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of residents and businesses impacted by the fire.

Residents say the Biolab incident has left them with various serious health issues, particularly respiratory issues. Others are alleging a variety of property-related damages, including loss of use and enjoyment of their homes, loss of profits for local businesses, reduction in property values, and costs for investigation, cleanup, and remediation.

Victims are seeking compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, relocation costs, property damage, and other related losses.

At the same time, the incident sparked an investigation resulting in multiple citations from the U.S. Department of Labor.

The department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation found that improperly stored hazardous chemicals were the cause of the fire. OSHA cited Bio-Lab for four serious and two otherthan-serious violations and proposed $61,473 in penalties, according to a department press release.

However, residents say that the fine is too small to be a real deterrent, and the backlash from community members has been considerable. They want to see BioLab permanently shut down and prevented from doing business throughout the entire state.

The Georgia Coalition for Environmental Policy and Protection — a group of environmental and science organizations from across the state — attempted (but failed) to push forward legislation called the “Bad Actor Bill,” which would have prohibited companies with prior environmental violations from doing business in Georgia.

“We need to make sure our state and federal environmental agencies have the resources they need to hold polluting companies to account,” said Jennette Gayer, director of Environment Georgia, which advocates for clean air, water and action against climate change. “This kind of toxic exposure is not acceptable.”

There has also been a racial component to the complaints. Kim Scott, executive director of the environmental group Georgia WAND, says that communities of color experience disproportionate pollution exposure and associated health conditions.

“If you’ve got air pollution, water pollution in a county, it impacts everybody. But a lot of times Brown and Black communities are more impacted because typically they’re already in a situation where they have had to endure legacy pollution,” Scott said.

Cheryl Garcia, 72, who is suffering respiratory problems as a result of the incident and is a member of the class action suit, echoed the sentiment. Because Rockdale County is predominantly Black, she believes the toxic atmosphere has been overlooked.

“The chemical companies that are here would never be in a town like Buckhead or Alpharetta, which are more white than Rockdale County,” Garcia said. “They just would not exist because the population would not tolerate it.”

And although the BioLab plant is the eighth largest employer in Rockdale County, residents say it’s not worth it.

'There are jobs associated with the plant, but this economic development is not worth the risk to public safety,” said U.S. Representative Hank Johnson. “At the very minimum, we should have enhanced federal and state oversight of what's going on inside the buildings where these kinds of hazardous substances are being stored.”

As to what kinds of hazardous materials were stored at the Conyers Biolab facility at the time of the incident, the clean-up involved removing 4 million pounds of trichlor, according to Rockdale County Fire Rescue Chief Marian McDaniel.

A U.S. Chemical Safety Board investigation has reported that “By September 2024, the warehouse’s inventory had grown to approximately 13.9 million pounds of various formulations of TCCA (trichlor), DCCA (dichlor), and BCDMH (brominating sanitizer) combined.”

The fire was caused by a malfunctioning sprinkler system at the plant, which exposed the trichlor (trichloroisocyanuric acid) to water, triggering a chemical reaction that led to the fire and the release of toxic chlorine gas. While the fire was initially controlled, it reignited during product removal and was still smoldering two days later, affecting areas within a 50-mile radius.

By October 7, 2024, the shelterin- place order was lifted except for those residents of Conyers who lived within a two-miles radius of the Bio-Lab plant. Shelter-in-place alerts for the two-mile radius continued nightly for nearly three weeks.

Biolab’s 2024 Conyers fire is the company’s latest major disaster. Similar incidents occurred in 2004, 2016, and 2020. And that’s a big component of the community backlash.

Scott says that businesses with poor environmental track records tend to move into other areas once they successfully set up shop in one community.

“When they expand, they’re taking all of their bad practices with them to the next location,” she said.

“[Other municipalities] have no idea that they were a bad commercial neighbor, a bad business in another location, and they’ll go on and say, ‘Hey, it’s good for business.’ Elected officials a lot of times say, ‘Hey, it’s creating jobs’ but … all money is not good money.”

Since Biolab’s closure announcement, the Committee to Protect Rockdale, formerly named the “Shutdown Bio-Lab Coalition,” said that the closure is a “good first step towards accountability” and are calling on local officials to continue to remediate the fallout from the fire.

“The announcement comes after months of continuous pressure from community members, environmental justice organizations, and public health experts,” the advocacy group wrote in a statement. “Along with the public health research, the committee is particularly concerned about an apparent lack of any chemical safety plan on the part of Rockdale County — despite multiple incidents involving just this one company over the last 20 years,”.

The group is requesting that the county Board of Commissioners deny any future business license renewal applications from BioLab’s parent company, KIK Consumer Products.

“Put simply: we don’t want to wake up in a year to find out that the company has quietly restarted production. We want the commission to leave no doubt,” the coalition wrote.