BioLab Closed Its Conyers Plant and Shifted the Hazard

KIK Consumer Products ceased BioLab operations in Conyers, Georgia, on May 15, 2025, after a warehouse fire sent a toxic plume across metro Atlanta. The pool-chemical site sits about 25 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, in Rockdale County near Interstate 20.

Federal investigators later found the fire was preventable. Production did not vanish. It moved to Ontario, California, and to unnamed third-party plants, while the Conyers land went up for sale.

KIK Stopped Conyers Operations and Listed the Land

BioLab Inc., the KIK subsidiary that makes pool and spa water-treatment chemicals, spent months cleaning Plant 12 after the September 29, 2024 fire. In May 2025 the company said manufacturing would not restart and that a nearby distribution center, cleared to reopen in November 2024, would keep filling orders from other plants.

“After taking steps to meet customer needs through alternative production, and in considering our future business needs carefully, we have made the difficult decision not to restart manufacturing at the Conyers plant,” BioLab said. It also said some manufacturing jobs would be cut and that “the safety and wellbeing of the Conyers community remain a top priority.”

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board later recorded a fuller exit. After remediation, KIK ceased operations at the Conyers facility on May 15, 2025, and listed the property for sale on January 27, 2026. As of June 2026, the CSB said, the land was still listed.

THE CONYERS EXIT

1. September 29, 2024: Water from a failed sprinkler hits stored pool chemicals in Plant 12, starting fires and a toxic plume.
2. November 2024: BioLab says authorities clear the Conyers distribution center to reopen.
3. May 15, 2025: KIK ceases operations at the Conyers facility after finishing cleanup.
4. January 27, 2026: The company lists the property for sale.
5. June 2026: The CSB records that the site is still listed.
6. July 21, 2026: The board issues its final report on the fire.

That sequence is the leftover the May 2025 announcement did not advertise. A distribution node that was supposed to keep running became, in the federal record, a vacant industrial lot on the market.

A Corroded Sprinkler Met 14 Million Pounds of Oxidizer

Plant 12 was built in 2019 as a storage warehouse, not a sealed chemical vault. In June 2019, Bio-Lab’s design-build contractor told local officials the building would hold an average inventory of about 6.2 million pounds of raw materials, including oxidizers.

By the morning of the fire it held far more. Around 5 a.m. on September 29, 2024, a corroded sprinkler part failed and dripped water onto chlorinated isocyanurates, the chlorine-rich solids used to sanitize pools. The CSB’s final investigation report on the Conyers fire says that contact started a decomposition reaction, heat, more sprinkler flow, and then fires that destroyed the warehouse.

PLANT 12 INVENTORY

The board said that load was more than twice what local officials had been told to expect. The outer bags were woven polypropylene and were not waterproof. The warehouse had no air conditioning, and its ventilation could not keep humidity down around that much oxidizer. Chlorine fumes mixed with moisture and formed hydrochloric acid on metal, including sprinkler heads.

A December 2023 annual inspection found 1,124 corroded sprinkler heads outside an interior firewalled zone workers called the bunker. Bio-Lab had swapped in corrosion-resistant heads inside the bunker. Outside it, the company kept replacing failed brass heads with more brass heads, even after it began stacking the same chemicals there. The first off-gassing started just outside the bunker, behind double-stacked rows that blocked workers and firefighters from pulling the reacting sacks.

The conditions and circumstances at the Bio-Lab Conyers warehouse were completely unacceptable. There were nearly 14 million pounds of reactive chemicals stored in the warehouse without proper safeguards in place. These hazardous chemicals were packaged in roughly 5,000 giant sacks, each weighing more than a ton, and some of them were stacked in such a way in the warehouse that responders were not able to keep the initial situation from developing into a catastrophic fire and massive plume of toxic smoke that put thousands of people potentially at risk.

Steve Owens, CSB Chairperson, July 21, 2026 news release

Flames showed through the roof by 6:40 a.m. The first building fire was knocked down about 8:10 a.m., then heat from still-decomposing sacks set off other sprinkler zones and more reactions. Rockdale County Fire Rescue answered the call with 14 mutual-aid units. The warehouse was a total loss. The CSB put property damage at $50.5 million and said no injuries were reported during the incident or the emergency response.

The board named five safety issues: run to failure, identification of storage hazards, risk management and oversight, industry guidance for pool-treatment chemicals, and regulatory coverage of reactive hazards. “Had Bio-Lab Conyers taken steps to proactively prevent sprinkler system leaks instead of allowing the system to run to failure, the incident likely would not have occurred,” the report said.

Where the Pool Chemicals Went After the Fire

KIK did not rebuild Plant 12. The CSB found that work once done in Conyers moved to Bio-Lab’s plant in Ontario, California, and to third-party manufacturing sites and warehouses. The May 2025 company line had already pointed to “alternative production” without naming those sites.

That shift is the second half of the shutdown. Conyers no longer holds the sacks. Somewhere else now does, including contractor sites the board later told KIK to audit. The chemicals are the same class of solids that off-gas chlorine, corrode metal, and run away when they get wet.

BioLab’s brands still need trichlor and dichlor for the U.S. pool season. After Hurricane Laura wrecked the company’s Louisiana trichlor works in 2020, KIK poured money into a new plant in Westlake rather than walk away from that market. Conyers got the other treatment: stop making product, then put the dirt on the market.

Seven Federal Recommendations Remain Open

The CSB does not fine companies. It writes recommendations and tracks whether anyone answers them. On the Conyers investigation page, the board lists seven recommendations still listed as open, with none closed. Four go to KIK. Three go to the National Fire Protection Association, which writes the hazardous-materials code that governs oxidizer storage.

The KIK items are aimed at the network that absorbed Conyers, not at a building that no longer stands. One tells the company to write a corporate storage standard for bulk pool chemicals across its Pool Division, using the Conyers and Lake Charles incident history. Another tells it to assess every third-party plant that makes or stores those bulk chemicals against NFPA 400 and NFPA 13, and to fix gaps on a set timetable, before those sites operate.

WHAT THE BOARD ASKED KIK TO DO

• Storage standard: Write and use a company-wide rule for bulk pool-treatment chemicals, including chlorinated isocyanurates and BCDMH, that matches NFPA storage and sprinkler rules.
• Contractor plants: Check every third-party site that makes or stores those bulk chemicals against the same codes before it runs, and fix older sites on a deadline.
• PSM Lite audit: Hire an outside auditor to test KIK’s lighter process-safety program at every Pool Division site that handles those chemicals.
• Follow-through audit: Hire an outside auditor to test whether the new storage and contractor standards are actually in force, then fix what that audit finds.

The NFPA items ask the code shop to treat pool oxidizers as materials that can carry more than one hazard, including metal corrosion that eats sprinkler parts. CSB Board Member Sylvia Johnson said the agency has been asking OSHA and the EPA since 2002 to widen rules on reactive chemicals. Lead investigator Vonzella Vincent noted that these solids can make toxic gas and still sit outside OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard and EPA’s Risk Management Plan rule.

Until those KIK items close, the federal file on Conyers is a completed investigation with an unfinished to-do list, pointed at the plants that took the work.

OSHA Proposed $61,473 for Six Storage Citations

The Department of Labor moved faster, and smaller. In an April 7, 2025 news release, OSHA said a warehouse that improperly stored hazardous chemicals was where the fire started, and it proposed $61,473 in civil penalties.

OSHA’S CONYERS CITATIONS

• Serious items: Four serious violations.
• Other items: Two other-than-serious violations.
• Proposed total: $61,473.
• Next step then: Bio-Lab had 15 business days to comply, meet, or contest the findings.

That dollar figure is a rounding error next to $50.5 million in property damage, and it never had to answer the CSB’s point about contractor warehouses. Neighbors went to court instead. Two proposed class actions filed in federal court in September 2026 seek damages for health harm and medical monitoring. One, Gregg et al. v. Bio-Lab, Inc. et al., was filed September 22 by five Rockdale County residents. Neither suit had been certified as a class as of those filings. An insurer also sued Bio-Lab and KIK companies in the Northern District of Georgia that month, trying to recover payouts on a nearby commercial property.

The Same Chemistry Burned in Louisiana First

Vincent tied Conyers to an earlier Bio-Lab loss the CSB already knew. In September 2020, water and trichlor met at the company’s Lake Charles-area plant in Westlake, Louisiana, during Hurricane Laura, and the works burned. KIK did not exit that parish. It rebuilt.

On November 2, 2022, the company marked a rebuilt trichlor plant outside Lake Charles after putting more than $250 million into the project. KIK said the new site would employ nearly 80 local union workers and add stronger fire detection and suppression, an elevated control room, and a ride-out shelter. CEO Michael Sload said the company had kept a promise to that community to rebuild in time for the 2023 pool season.

The CSB says KIK did not turn those lessons into a company-wide fix for corroding sprinklers and wet oxidizers. Conyers kept running brass heads to failure. The Georgia warehouse then did what the Louisiana plant had already shown those chemicals can do when water gets in.

Conyers Residents Took the Plume to Court

The plume was the part of the accident people in Rockdale County actually lived inside. The CSB, citing local tallies, said roughly 17,000 people were evacuated and about 90,000 people in the Atlanta area were told to shelter in place. Nightly shelter warnings covered a 2-mile radius for 17 days. Schools were closed for nearly two weeks.

On the first afternoon, people sitting under the cloud were told to shut doors, windows, and air conditioners, and they still did not have a clean list of what they were breathing. Officials mixed shelter advice with later pleas to leave. That confusion, more than the later corporate statement about “alternative production,” is what neighbors kept arguing about.

EPA Region 4 ran air monitoring with Rockdale County, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, and BioLab through the emergency, then handed remaining oversight to the state on October 17, 2024. The agency compares chlorine readings to a one-hour chlorine action level of 0.5 ppm, a screening number meant to protect children and people with lung trouble. A CSB investigation update found a monitor just southeast of the site hit a chlorine maximum of 31.20 ppm between midnight and 3 a.m. on the night of September 30 to October 1, 2024, with an hourly average of 10.7 ppm in that window.

The board’s “no injuries” finding covers the fireground and the official response, not the months of sore throats, headaches, and hospital visits residents later described. Two years after the fire, proposed class actions were still asking a court to order medical monitoring. State records obtained around the anniversary also showed gaps in post-fire testing, including hexavalent chromium, dioxins, and furans that contractors had declined to sample.

KIK can point to a cleaned lot, a sale listing, and pool chemicals packed somewhere other than Rockdale County. The CSB can point to a finished report. What it cannot point to yet is a closed recommendation on the third-party plants now holding the sacks, or a finished answer for the people who watched the cloud drift over I-20.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a completed plant shutdown, a federal accident investigation, and related court filings. It is for information only and is not medical, legal, or environmental-health advice. It does not tell anyone whether to seek care, join a lawsuit, or test property, and it does not grade individual medical claims. Readers with health questions should talk with a licensed physician; readers weighing legal claims should talk with a qualified attorney. Figures, case statuses, and recommendation listings reflect the agency records and filings cited here and can change.