Time again plays in fortune’s favor as an even worse disaster is averted
Wilma Shahan was asleep when the window above her bed blew in, showering her with glass.
“I thought a car ran into the house,” she said on Wednesday, a few hours after the dead-of-night fireball in Port Neches. “It was a loud explosion, so loud it busted my hearing aids.”
Still, it was just a close call for the Shahans and an estimated 38,000 others who live within a 3-mile radius of the plant. Three schools, two churches and a library are within a mile. Thirty percent of residents are 17 or younger. Had the first blast occurred at, say, 1 p.m. instead of 1 a.m., many more folks would have been in harm’s way.
Roger Wallace’s granddaughter might have been playing with her toys, which he kept in the utility
room of his townhouse on Merriman Street. Instead, she was asleep in another room when the blast blew out the front window and tore the utility-room door from its hinges.
The Avenue Coffee Cafe wasn’t open yet, so no one was there having a morning cup when the blast tore through. It was relatively easy for co-owner David Pool to sweep up the glass and put a pot on afterward.
Three workers inside the plant were injured and at least five people who live beyond the fence line were hit by shattered glass. The worst-case scenarios are hard to ponder.
“Had this happened during day time or during school hours, we could have seen far more injuries than we did,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of the Environment Texas advocacy group. “I guess you can say it’s a silver lining to the accident (or) blind luck there wasn’t even more damage than it did cause.”
Southeast Texas over the last several months has seen four chemical fires — including one with a fatality — but perhaps none have had such an immediate and tangible impact in the wider outside community as the TPC, experts and advocates said.
“It’s hard to compare one (incident) to another,” Metzger said. “But in terms of the damage to the community, this one definitely sticks out as having some of the most tangible impacts we can measure now.”
For some, the sound of the explosion, the splintered wooden doors and shattered windows, echoed the 2013 West Fertilizer incident that killed 15, injured more than 200 and flattened much of the farming community south of Dallas.
The West disaster narrowly avoided even higher casualties as the explosion happened hours after students had left the middle school for the day.
The most recent accident, at TPC on Wednesday, happened around 1 a.m. at the lead-in to the Thanksgiving holiday. Only about 30 workers were present at the facility. For most folks, it was bedtime. Wilma Shahan and her husband escaped without a scratch. But their home was littered with glass shards and other debris. The front door was left hanging open, its dead bolt bent in an L-shape.
Port Neches Mayor Glenn Johnson, after inspecting damage around the city with police and emergency management personnel, said there was damage to the library, public works building and city hall. Port Neches-Groves High
School lost some windows, and district officials will decide over the weekend when it will be safe for students to return.
At first light, residents and business owners were already sweeping up glass and calling contractors about windows and roofs. Some homes had signs of structural damage with rafts sticking out of their shingles on the outside of the roof. Then there was a second explosion about 1:45 p.m. That was followed by an evacuation order and an emergency declaration.
But at least it felt like there was time to prepare to take action, to drive outside the 4-mile danger radius.
The story of chemical incidents in the U.S. is one where fortune has prevented disasters from being far worse, said Dan Holmstrom, who worked as the director of the western regional office of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board for 17 years. He retired from the CSB in 2016.
• In 2008, an explosion at the Bayer CropScience chemical facility in West Virginia sent shrapnel that barely missed a tank of highly toxic methyl isocyanate, the chemical that killed thousands in Bhopal, India.
• In 2013, an explosion at the Williams Olefins plant in Geismar, La., injured two workers. A large number of workers were near the site of the explosion just minutes before. Because they had just gone on break, many were spared death or injury.
• In 2015, an explosion at the Exxon-Mobil refinery in Torrance, Calif., injured two workers. But the shrapnel from the explosion missed a massive tank of hydrofluoric acid. More than 250,000 residents lived within three miles of the plant. If the tank had ruptured, the death toll could have been in the thousands.
•
“These major accidents are low-frequency, high-consequence ones,” Holmstrom said. “You can’t just look at how often they happen. It’s better to look at the foreseeable consequences and do what you can to prevent it.”
Last week, the administration of President Donald Trump reversed a series of chemical safety regulations created in response to the deadly explosion in West, Texas. Under the new rule, companies will not have to do third-party audits or a root-cause analysis after an incident. They also will not have to provide the public access to information about what type of chemicals are stored in these facilities either.
Among the reasons cited by the Environmental Protection Agency for the rule reversal were a desire to reduce “unnecessary regulations,” the economic cost for companies to follow the stricter regulations, and potential security risks from disclosing chemical plant inventories and facility locations to the public.
The federal rule change had been pushed by the industry and decried by coalitions including environmentalists, fence-line community members, first-responders and labor unions.
“This is a demonstration of why we need that kind of protection for our communities to prevent incidents like this from happening, to do a very thorough analysis of why they are happening and prevent them from happening again,” said Stephanie Thomas, a Houston-based researcher with Public Citizen.
“It’s not fool-proof to say the rule would have prevented an incident like this,” she added, “but I think it would have certainly helped support companies to look more deeply into operating in a more safe manner and if anything this year has shown us that safety really needs to be of the utmost importance because communities aren’t feeling safe right now.”