Chemical fires aren’t something we should accept as routine
Spring is upon us; perhaps that explains why some residents of southeast Texas have been feeling dizzy this week.
It’s also possible, however, that Texans are feeling dizzy as a result of an as-yet ongoing chemical fire at an Inter continental Terminals Co. facility in the small city of Deer Park in southeast Harris County. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Monday said that those of us here on the ground have no need to worry about health impacts as a result of the blaze. Harris County officials, similarly, have offered reassuring reminders that the plume of black smoke hanging over Houston is hundreds of feet above us, high up in the sky.
And Deer Park residents have been mostly stoic in the face of the blaze, which began Sunday.
Sure, Texans who live in the immediate vicinity of the facility had to shelter in place for a while that afternoon and schools in Deer Park and La Porte ISDs were closed Monday. But as one woman told the Houston Chronicle, living in a hub of America’s petrochemical industry is “probably like living along a fault line” — certain communities are just prone to chemical fires, as others are prone to earthquakes.
There’s something to that. The Deer Park fire wasn’t the only industrial fire of note in the Houston area this weekend. There was a fire at Exxon-Mobil’s Baytown refinery Saturday afternoon, but that one was quickly contained.
Thus far, there have been no explosions at the Deer Park facility; that’s good news.
But the chemicals burning at the Deer Park facility obviously aren’t good for our regional air quality.
And the various officials who’ve been reassuring us that there’s nothing to worry about might be right — but if so, they got lucky.
Officials initially expected
that the fire would be over by Wednesday. At a news conference Tuesday morning, Harris County Fire Marshall Laurie Christensen revised that prediction, in light of a snafu the previous evening.
Of the 15 chemical tanks at the Deer Park facility — each of which can hold 80,000 barrels of chemicals — six were on fire late Monday when firefighters confronted a drop in water pressure, courtesy of two malfunctioning fireboat pumps. By the time that issue was resolved six hours later, two additional chemical tanks had caught fire.
By Tuesday morning, however, only five were still burning and three had been emptied as a result of the conflagration. Two were already empty.
And according to ITC spokeswoman Alice Richardson, the company was doing “everything humanly possible” to make sure that the fire didn’t spread to the other five tanks at the facility.
If those efforts are successful, the chemical fire in Deer Park will end when the five tanks burn out.
However, it’s hard to have confidence in ITC’s efforts given that the company has a long history of violating clean air and clean water rules and has also been cited for failure to comply with federal risk management regulations.
The leaders of the state’s environmental agency, meanwhile, are downplaying the risks presented by the chemical fire at the Deer Park facility even as the plume of black smoke continues to spread north and west.
“Sensitive populations should consider limiting their exposure to the ambient particulate matter by decreasing outdoor exercise or moving into air-conditioned buildings,” TCEQ said in a statement Tuesday afternoon, after its tests found that levels of particulate matter had increased slightly.
“All residents should avoid being directly in the smoke plume,” the statement continued.
That is sound, commonsense advice which people could have figured out for themselves.
In fact, I noticed several people wearing air masks Tuesday around Houston, while going about their business.
The petrochemical industry is crucial to the region’s prosperity, but the concerns raised by the Deer Park fire aren’t frivolous, and need to be taken more seriously.
Earthquakes are caused by plate tectonics, a geological phenomenon. Chemical fires, by contrast, aren’t inevitable or something we should accept as routine.
If people who live in the Houston area have come to consider such incidents acceptable that is, in a sense, a choice we have collectively made — and which we might like to revisit at some point, in light of events over the past few days.