Toxic dangers may reflare; House OKs Harvey aid bill
As industrial facilities damaged by storm reboot, safety issues could stay hidden for months or years to come
More than a dozen Texas chemical and refining plants reported damaged storage tanks, ruptured containment systems and malfunctioning pressure relief valves as a result of Hurricane Harvey, portending safety problems that might not become apparent for months or years, according to a Houston Chronicle review of regulatory filings.
The filings are incomplete and represent only damage that produced excessive air pollution, a fraction of the impact on plants in southeast Texas that provide more than 40 percent of the nation’s petrochemical capacity and about 30 percent of its refining.
At Shell’s Deer Park refinery, two tanks were damaged and oil ran into a surrounding berm. At BASF’s Beaumont pesticide plant, tanks overflowed and leaked unknown chemicals. At the Chevron Phillips Cedar Bayou plant, a cooling pump failed, causing over-pressurized chemicals to be burned off in a flare.
When Harvey swept through the Gulf Coast and Houston area, it forced the shutdown of hundreds of industrial facilities across the region. Now, with waters receding, these operations will be coming back on line in the coming weeks, raising the prospect of cancer-causing gas emissions, toxic spills, fires and explosions, said Sam Mannan, director of a center that
studies chemical process safety at Texas A&M university.
“Such a large industry coming up at the same time,” he said. “All you need to do is have some mistakes pop up somewhere and it will be magnified elsewhere.”
Further, experts noted, the long-term implications of flooding disasters of this scale in petrochemical clusters have been poorly studied, and the possibility of future plant mishaps — months or years away — stands to be worsened by damages that have yet to be discovered.
“There are two things to focus on,” said Jordan Barab, a former top Occupational Safety and Health Administration official. “The startup problem, and then longer-term safety.”
Restarting a chemical plant or refinery already is the most dangerous period in the life of a plant, because it entails regenerating complex chains of chemical reactions that require a perfect balance to prevent uncontrolled releases and explosions.
“Will (companies) be offering bonuses and other incentives to speed the restart?” Barab asked. “How many normal procedures will be loosened because it’s an emergency situation? How much overtime will workers be required to work and what kind of fatigue factors will they be dealing with? Will chemical exposures be overlooked because it’s an emergency? How are they going to deal with safety issues if some instruments ... will not work prior to restart?”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality are poorly equipped to monitor plant startups or look for long-term problems because they are understaffed, underfunded and don’t account for scores of dangerous chemicals, the Chronicle found in a 2016 investigation.
“Who is going to oversee any of this?” Barab asked. “The answer is no one.”
President Donald Trump’s budget cut OSHA enforcement spending — including inspections — but a House budget committee in July went even further, proposing cuts of $14.7 million, or more than 7 percent. The agency was already unable to inspect most facilities.
Inspections stop
The Labor Department said Aug. 31 that it would stop doing scheduled workplace inspections in Harvey-affected areas, choosing to focus instead on the safety of recovery workers. That means regular visits to petrochemical facilities will stop, Barab said, leaving no one to oversee the massive startup of hundreds of facilities up and down the Gulf Coast.
Harvey knocked out almost a quarter of the U.S. refining capacity, and more than half of the nation’s ethylene, a plastics building block, hadn’t come back on line almost two weeks after the storm.
OSHA didn’t immediately respond to questions about how long the hold on enforcement actions will last and what else it might do to oversee recovery operations at plants.
Gov. Greg Abbott waived requirements that companies submit air pollution reports during recovery. They will have to record them later, a spokeswoman for TCEQ said. In the interim, the missing data means clues about malfunctioning plant equipment and health exposures for coastal residents are unavailable.
Some companies continue to voluntarily report emissions, and the Center for Biological Diversity, using those incomplete reports, showed that Texas plants released nearly 1 million pounds of seven especially dangerous pollutants during flaring and chemical spills triggered by Harvey.
Plants burn off excess chemicals in flares to prevent more dire releases during equipment malfunctions, shutdowns and startups. The practice is legal.
Those seven chemicals can cause serious health problems, and several cause cancer, according to the center.
Storm-related shutdowns of oil refineries have emitted pollutants that help form ozone, the Environmental Defense Fund said, and the Houston region has been under ozone warnings because of concentrations 10 times higher than what health officials deem safe. EPA cuts
Meanwhile, the EPA is investigating a benzene plume in the area of Valero’s refinery in Manchester. It said it has about 160 people helping hurricane response efforts and is using aircraft to monitor industrial sites on the Houston Ship Channel, including the benzene concerns.
But in a response to questions, the agency provided no details on whether it would step up monitoring of plants that are restarting or establish any long-term recovery oversight of facilities in its Risk Management Program, which have some of the most hazardous chemical inventories.
There’s a concern that if the EPA does not increase inspections, the public could be in the dark about how much it’s exposed to potentially harmful chemicals because of the storm.
“God knows what’s in the soil and water now that floodwaters have receded,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I don’t know if there’s a capacity to test what you’d ideally want to test.”
New EPA rules established by the Obama administration were delayed by the new head of the agency, Scott Pruitt. The rules would require facilities to consider reducing dangerous chemical inventories and get outside safety audits.
RMP facilities develop worstcase scenarios that are supposed to give plant employees, first responders and the public information they need to prepare for disasters. Arkema’s plan for its explosive chemicals didn’t work.
“Worst-case scenarios take a series of things to go wrong all at once,” said Paul Orum, a consultant and longtime chemical safety advocate. “But worse things do go wrong all at once, all the time.”
He argued a third-party audit could have caught the flaws in Arkema’s hurricane plans. The company has said no one could have prepared for that much rain.
Trump targeted the EPA for even deeper cuts than OSHA. The agency’s enforcement office is slated for a 40 percent reduction. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group representing government environmental workers, published data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showing that criminal pollution cases initiated by the EPA fell two-thirds since 2012, while the number of agents in the division dropped by half since 2003, leaving it 53 agents shy of the number required by law.
More storms
A series of blasts at the Arkema chemical plant northeast of Houston showed how a storm like Harvey can thwart any company’s best-laid plans, as up to 50 inches of rain swamped the factory, cut power and deluged backup refrigeration systems for heat-sensitive chemicals. Three freezer trucks exploded over six days and the remaining six trucks were intentionally burned while a 1.5-mile area around the plant was evacuated.
Residents are worried about chemicals in the air and dust.
The effect of natural disasters — particularly flooding — on hazardous facilities didn’t draw much attention until the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster brought on by a tsunami in Japan in 2011, Mannan said.
A 2009 analysis of multiple chemical incident databases worldwide by researchers at the University of Bologna in Italy found storage tanks, pipes and compressors were the most likely to be damaged in flood events. And major releases were more likely to occur when floodwaters were more than 3 feet high.
Houston has experienced three major flooding events in the past three years. With Hurricane Irma heading toward the U.S. and Tropical Storm Jose not far behind, the area might not be finished with major flooding events for 2017.
“We’re going to see more extreme weather events hitting the Gulf with more frequency, and both government and business are going to have to deal with that,” Barab said.
Every major storm will challenge the disaster plans for facilities throughout the area. Not every plan will pass that test.
Barab questioned why Arkema hadn’t done more to protect its refrigeration and power systems when Houston hospitals in the Texas Medical Center had done so after Tropical Storm Allison caused what, up to that point, had been unimaginable flooding. He fears too many plants don’t account for true worst cases.
“Evacuating an unstable plant and watching it explode,” Barab said, “isn’t exactly an acceptable solution.”