Neighborliness
Think of what it means to be a good neighbor in a residential setting.
If you don’t know who lives next door, but periodically hear loud noises, see flames lighting up the night and have to fight the traffic of their visitors during rush hour, it’s unlikely you’d brag about your situation.
Now, consider that you’re friends with the raucous family next door. That sometimes they have mishaps and, when they do, they run over to you to explain what happened. You trust them. They repay you for the incon-venience by buying your kids’ Girl Scout cookies. You got your job because they recommended you for it. Everyone else is friends with them as well.
That’s how the Dixons and many others experience life in Norco, a town named for the New Orleans Refining Co. that sprawled its metal towers, tanks and smokestacks over the sugar cane fields of the Goodhope plantation a century ago. Shell bought the facility in 1929.
“It does get noisy,” Ms. Dixon said. “And sometimes the windows rattle and the house shakes” when the company sets off its flares.
“That’s a good thing,” she said. “They’re burning off some bad stuff.”
In Beaver County, not a meeting has gone by where a discussion about the future cracker plant hasn’t mentioned the flares — the most visible sign that something isn’t working as it should.
That’s not lost on Shell, even in places like Norco, where everyone is but a degree of separation from someone whose livelihood depends on the plant.
Inside its control room, where computer screens line the walls and cubicles, keeping track of hundreds of thousands of flanges and valves, there are a few old school television screens showing a grainy live stream of the flare towers.
“Normally, you want to see nothing,” said Michiel Regelink, production unit manager for olefins at the Norco Manufacturing Complex, offering a reminder that a flare is a safety device, meant to relieve pressure and burn chemicals that would otherwise be released into the air. Flaring can happen when equipment is being cleaned or repaired, or during upsets.
How frequently does Shell need to use it? “Too frequently,” Mr. Regelink said. That’s because whenever it happens — even if it’s a relatively rare event — the engineers inside wish it weren’t so.
When the emergency flare is lit in Norco, it’s so bright on the Dixons’ porch that they can read a newspaper by the orange light. Sometimes they sit in their rocking chairs and watch the flames.
They haven’t seen the flare “in months,” they said. “Probably sometime around August,” Mr. Dixon guessed.
According to the company’s Facebook feed, which posts alerts for residents to anticipate flaring and odors, there have been 11 such events since June: six were unit upsets, and the rest maintenance-related conditions.
The Dixons don’t sit there thinking about what chemicals are in the flare because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency takes care of all of that, they said.