Key air monitors knocked offline
Hazardous emissions from a chlorine plant fire, abruptly shuttered oil and gas refineries and still- to- be assessed plant damage are seeping into the air after Hurricane Laura, regulators say, but some key state and federal monitors to alert the public of air dangers remain offline in Louisiana.
While the chlorine fire was being monitored as a potential health threat, Louisiana environmental spokesman Greg Langley says he knows of no other major industrial health risks from the storm in the state. He said restoring power and water was a bigger priority.
But some Louisiana residents and environmental advocates say the lack of solid government information on the state of the air is typical. With dozens of petroleum, petrochemical and other industrial sites, Louisiana is home to communities with some of the nation’s highest cancer risks, according to Environmental Protection Agency rankings.
In the Lake Charles area, with refineries, a major natural gas project and other industrial sites, residents “generally don’t get any information except what the industry puts out,” said Carla Chrisco, a Lake Charles lawyer who evacuated the city before Laura.
The area was among the hardest hit Thursday. Laura struck parts of the TexasLouisiana coast with up to 150- mph winds and a storm surge that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said rose as high as 15 feet.
Louisiana officials reported two additional deaths on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths attributed to the storm in Louisiana and Texas to 18; more than half of those were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Oil and gas facilities that the U. S. Department of Energy
says account for 13% of U. S. refinery capacity shut down as a precaution along an industrialized roughly 60- mile stretch from Port Arthur, Texas, to Lake Charles before the hurricane.
The abrupt shutdowns, and eventual restarts, for hurricanes typically mean the emission of up to millions of pounds of additional cancer- causing soot, heavy metals and other hazards from refinery smokestacks.
A fire at a plant making swimming pool chemicals in Westlake, part of the larger Lake Charles area, since Thursday has on a few occasions sent enough chlorine into the air to be detected by emergency workers’ hand- held monitors, Langley said. Chlorine levels were not high enough to warrant evacuation, officials said, although residents of the industrial area around the plant were under orders to shelter inside their homes for days after Laura’s landfall.
With debris clogging roads, industry still is assessing damage along the Texas- Louisiana coast. No word of any major industrial threat other than the chlorine plant fire had emerged by three days after Laura. After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, confirmation of more than a hundred toxic spills into the air, land and water took days, weeks and months to become public, and many were never investigated.
“In a storm of this magnitude, there’s going to be some leaks, there’s going to be some spills,” Langley said Saturday. “We’re still in the process of assessing that. I don’t know of anything personally that’s major.”
Texas has requested the EPA’s help overall looking for any so- far undiscovered hazardous air releases after the hurricane, but Louisiana, with the exception of the chlorine plant fire, has not, EPA spokesman James Hewitt said.