Concerns rise with plant’s smoke plume near school
Liana Silva noticed the black plume of smoke Wednesday morning as she drove to Cesar E. Chavez High School, where she teaches English, and her mind immediately raced back to past plant incidents.
“Are we doing this again?” she wondered.
A mile away, a TPC Group petrochemical facility had lost power the night before and was flaring unspecified hydrocarbons without the steam usually used in the process. Flaring without steam causes more contaminants to be released, according to Air Alliance Houston.
Harris County and TPC Group said they were monitoring air quality in the area but saw no cause for alarm.
One elevated reading of 1,3-butadiene, a carcinogen, at a state monitor in Milby Park caught the attention of Corey Williams, Air Alliance Houston’s research and policy director. But itwas stillwell below the amount considered harmful short-term.
Silva, 39, continued driving to work. She wished for more information. What was happening? What were the health repercussions? With the coronavirus pandemic, she wanted to be sure to
keep her lungs healthy.
The incident highlighted issues that Houston and Harris County have been working to fix since a string of petrochemical plant disasters last year raised concerns about the lack of a centralized notification system and lagging air-quality monitoring in the region. Smoke continued to be visible through the day Wednesday.
Unlike the 2019 Intercontinental TerminalsCo. fire— which drew national attention with a plume of black smoke that could been seen for miles — Silva was concerned that this incident might be swept under the rug because it occurred in a lower socioeconomic part of town.
“They’re no strangers to this,” she said of her students, who weren’t back in the classroomyet for in-person learning. “People need to be aware of the health repercussions to the communities surrounding those petrochemical plants.”
TPC Group first issued a notice at 6:20 p.m. Tuesday that there might be loud noises andflaring at its facility at 8600 Park Place “due to an operational issue at
the plant.”
An unexplained power outage caused the boilers, which produce steam for flaring, to shut down, company spokeswoman Sara Cronin said. The lack of steam caused the dark smoke.
Cronin did not say specifically what was burning, describing the fl are more generally as burning off“hydrocarbons .” They worked Wednesday to get power restored and expected the
boilers to come back on that night, causing steam that would be visible too.
“Operations personnel continue to work to resolve the issue as quickly and safely as possible,” the company said.
The incident was not the company’s first: Its facility in Port Neches twice exploded last year on the day before Thanksgiving. The disaster caused injuries, home damage and evacuations. The Beaumont Enter
prise described that plume as “like a macabre Thanksgiving balloon.”
Both facilities made and processed butadiene, which has varied uses, said Williams. It was the most concerning of the known chemicals on site. The Milby Park monitor at 8 a.m. Wednesday measured the contaminant’s concentration as 18 parts per billion, far below the 1,700 parts per billion threshold for what is considered to cause
harm short-term.
But Williams noted that the hourly reading was an average, so it wasn’t known how high it got or how high it might have been between the monitor and plant.
TPC Group posted updates to the Community Awareness Emergency Response Online system, or CAER Online, which is available as an app and meant for the public to get information about anything unusual occurring at industrial sites.
Harris County posted its update and monitoring data to Facebook, but the county has not yet developed a robust warning system like that used for floods. They hope to have one in the future. Only around 350 people follow the pollution-control Facebook page.
At school, Silva opted not to take her usual lunchtime walk to get some fresh air.
Another teacher, Hector Morales, worried for his health, too. He and some of his colleagues had received an emailed statement from the company, but he didn’t trust the company’s assurance that the air was OK to breathe.
“I think I know better,” said Morales, 33, who worked for Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia before this school year. “When a company says that it’s not harmful, you take it with a grain of salt.”
Roseanne Peters had noticed the smoke the night before, even against a darkened sky. It seemed large, but living in Meadowcreek Village, so near the plants, she was somewhat used to seeing flaring. She fell asleep thinking about it, but not overly concerned.
When she awoke to the billowing, black smoke again Wednesday, she too wanted to know what was burning. But even as president of her neigborhood’s civic association, she hadn’t received any alerts and didn’t know where to find them.
“Is it something toxic? Is it something we can live with?” she wondered.
The plume added to growing concerns about what she might be breathing. Peters is 65 and has asthma and bronchitis. Already it was a bad time for allergies. It was a high ozone day. And of course there was COVID-19.
“And now we have smoke in the air,” she said, “and so I’m wearing my mask today because of all of it.”