Houston left with a toxic mess as Trump relaxes rules
The rule in question probably wouldn’t have prevented Thursday’s explosions, but it's aimed at reducing the likelihood of future accidents — and ensuring that emergency responders and the public know what types of dangerous substances they might be exposed to. Firefighters and other emergency crews lack much of that crucial information about the plants and factories now awash with floodwater.
“It’s extremely frustrating, it’s disheartening, it’s unfair to the communities that face these risks,” Bakeyah Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston, said of the regulatory rollbacks the administration is pushing. “Not just in a natural disaster-type situation, but on a daily basis.”
Collapsed chemical tank roofs, machinery malfunctions and other accidents in the Houston area have sent more than 1,000 tons of dangerous chemicals into the air following days of pummeling from Harvey, according to a POLITICO analysis of incident filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Sometimes, toxic chemicals sit in huge storage tanks that border residents’ backyards.
Refiners said they won’t know the extent of the damage until the waters recede and they can get back into the plants. But emergency crews will have to perform their duties in toxic surroundings, said James Norton, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.
“I’d put it on the scale of 9/11 health risk,” said Norton, now the head of the consulting group Play-Action Strategies. “There was a similar challenge in Katrina, as the standing water around the city kind of became a chemical sludge. The risk in Houston is greater."
The swath of the Gulf Coast that Harvey tore apart is home to more than 300 hazardous chemical sites, according to data from the Sierra Club, including more than 230 chemical plants and over 30 refineries. And just clearing the damage will pose health problems. Texas’ famously lax site regulations and inspection rates will make normally straightforward emergency response problematic, as firefighters and others may not know whether a storage site's equipment is up to date or even what chemicals it's storing, said Elena Craft, a senior health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund in Austin.
“Emergency responders don’t have the information they need about what’s being stored at the facilities,” Craft said. “And because these facilities have flooded, and underground tank contents are coming up, all of that will magnify what we had with Katrina.”
Another worry is air pollution worsened by the volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide that refineries and chemical plants are spewing, which Craft said may endanger flood victims who suffer from asthma and other respiratory or cardiac problems. The Texas environmental commission has forecast that air quality in Houston will be “unhealthy for sensitive groups” at least through the weekend.
Thursday’s fires broke out in the early morning at the plant in Crosby, about 20 miles northeast of Houston, according to county officials. Arkema has blamed the incident on power outages and backup systems failures caused by the historic flooding triggered by the storm, which made landfall on Friday as a Category 4 hurricane.
The Arkema plant produces organic peroxides, which are used to make plastics and fiberglass but must be kept refrigerated.
Harris County evacuated everyone in a 1.5-mile radius, and several sheriff’s deputies who had breathed the smoke were sent to the hospital before being cleared, county Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a news conference. Gonzalez downplayed the incident, saying the officers were “basically standing over a barbecue pit and getting smoke in our eyes. That’s basically what occurred.”
Two raw materials stored on site and covered by EPA's risk management rules, sulfur dioxide and a chemical called 2-methylpropene, are stored safely and are not considered at risk, Arkema executive Richard Rennard said.
EPA dispatched a sniffer plane equipped with sensors to detect chemical and radiological materials. It found “no concentrations of concern for toxic materials” as of Thursday morning, Administrator Scott Pruitt said in a statement.
Separately, the federal Chemical Safety Board is investigating the fire, board Chairwoman Vanessa Sutherland said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. CSB investigators will not visit the site until it is deemed safe, but they are obtaining documents about what types of chemicals were used and stored at the plant.
Trump's proposed budget for next year would eliminate all funding for the board, which issues safety recommendations but cannot directly enforce regulations.
Meanwhile, county emergency workers acknowledged they have no idea what other chemical plants in the area might pose an immediate risk.
“We are personally not monitoring” the status of chemicals kept in other plants in Harvey’s path, said Bob Royall, the county's assistant chief of emergency operations. “That is industry’s responsibility.”
Public health advocates say the incident adds to the need for carrying out the Obama administration rule, which would require companies to provide more public information about the chemicals they’re storing, encourage them to look for safer alternatives and mandate third-party safety audits.
“The longer EPA delays the chemical disaster rule, the longer those types of assessments and investments will be delayed,” Nelson said. “We’re in a crisis situation here, and making policies or creating policies or buckling to industry pressure has real everyday life-or-death impacts to people.”
Nelson’s group has led a lawsuit trying to overturn Pruitt’s delay of the safety rule, which was finalized in the last days of the Obama administration but never took effect.
Arkema criticized the rule last year, telling EPA that the independent audits would "add significant new costs and burdens" but "may not necessarily provide new or additional safety benefits." It also raised security-related concerns about sharing some information with responders and the public.
The Trump administration placed the regulation on ice shortly after taking office. EPA said in June that it would delay the rule until 2019 at the earliest while it reviews the program and potentially revises it.
In a statement, EPA noted that previous risk management rules are still in effect, and said Arkema's Crosby plant updated its emergency plan in 2014. EPA also noted that no major updates would have taken effect until next year anyway.
"The Agency’s recent action to delay the effectiveness of the 2017 Amendments had no effect on the major safety requirements that applied to the Arkema Crosby plant at the time of the fire," EPA said.
The Obama administration rule allowed between one and four years for facilities to meet various requirements under the update — meaning that the Arkema plant probably wouldn't have been affected even if the regulation were in place.
“Realistically, it probably wouldn’t have prevented anything right now in this instance,” said Gordon Sommers, an Earthjustice attorney working on the lawsuit against Pruitt’s stay. "But we’re seeing more and more of these massive weather events, and this certainly illustrates the need for that rule."
Royall said the explosions reported at the plant were more like “small container ruptures that may have a sound of a pop or something of that nature. This is not a massive explosion.”
He said the burning peroxides, which are stored in refrigerated 18-wheel truck trailers, emit gases that expand and rupture the trailers’ relief valves before eventually burning.
Arkema’s Rennard said the company expects another eight trailers to similarly go up in flames in the coming days, although he warned that the high oxygen content of the peroxides could still lead to an explosion.
“We don’t want people returning back to their homes thinking it’s over. It’s not over,” Rennard said, adding: “I think we’ve been a responsible neighbor, and I think we’re responding to this the best way we can.”
While the rule remains on ice, the lawsuit over Pruitt’s delay is ongoing.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday that public health groups had failed to meet the high bar for reinstating the rule, which would have relied in part on showing both a public interest and a threat of irreparable harm. But the judges placed the lawsuit on a fast track that could see a decision by late this year or in early 2018.
“We will certainly use this as an opportunity to continue to highlight the necessity and the critical nature of having this rule in place,” Nelson said.
Flooded Houston Chemical Plant Explodes as Harvey's Devastation Lingers
Alex Horton and Mark Berman, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The remnants of Hurricane Harvey carried its wrath up the Mississippi Delta on Thursday, but not before hammering the Gulf Coast with more punishing cloudbursts and growing threats that included reports of 'pops' and 'chemical reactions' at a crippled chemical plant and the collapse of the drinking water system in a Texas city."
READ MORE
REPUBLICAN DEREGULATION policy defined in Hurricane Harvey aftermath.
Texas SUPERFUND SITES are underwater.
CEO of Arkema Rich Rowe refused to disclosed chemicals stored at the chemical plant that exploded and caught fire.
Republicans are more focused on inflammatory issues and REPUBLICAN GERRYMANDERING to disenfranchise voters of color than they are on protecting Texans.
STOP THE RIGGED GOP ELECTIONS & VOTE THEM OUT!
The Chemical Plant Explosion in Texas Is Not an Accident. It's the Result of Specific Choices.
The perils of deregulation.
o, conservative ideas have triumphed in Texas. A business-friendly environment has been created, based on free-market principles, deregulation, and a return to 10th amendment freedoms just as the Founders designed them, because the best government is the one that is closest to the people.
Basic chemistry doesn't care, via NBC News:
A flooded chemical plant near Houston exploded twice early Thursday, sending a plume of smoke into the air and triggering a fire that the firm plans to let "burn itself out." Arkema Group, which is one of the world's largest chemical companies, had warned Wednesday that the plant would catch fire and explode at some point — adding there was nothing that could be done about it.
Awfully blithe for a company whose massive chemical plant just exploded because the company was unprepared for a completely predictable meteorological catastrophe, I'd say. Of course, over the past two days, the Arkema people have given us a master class in Not Giving A Damn. Anyone who saw the essential Matt Dempsey of the Houston Chronicle on the electric teevee machine with Kindly Doc Maddow on Wednesday night knows exactly what I'm talking about. (And, if you're not following him on the electric Twitter machine—@mizzousundevil—you should be.) They played a tape of a conference call on which Dempsey pressed the CEO of Arkema, Rich Rowe, about what substances were in the company's plant that would be released if the plant blew, as it apparently did Thursday morning. Rowe refused to answer, which was his perfect right within Texas' business-friendly environment. They could be hoarding nerve gas in that place, and be perfectly within the law not to tell anybody about it.
AP
In fact, and this is the delectable part of the entire farce, there apparently is a law in Texas that specifically forbids many cities and towns from designing their own fire codes. Hell, the state even passed a law forbidding cities and towns from requiring fire sprinklers in new construction. Freedom!
Two years ago, Dempsey and his team put together a staggering eight-part series about the lack of rudimentary safety precautions that exists in what has become the petrochemical capital of the country. The series took a chunk out of both the recklessness of the Texas state government and out of the spavined state of the EPA and OSHA even under President Obama, the latter problems having gotten worse under the current administration. You should read the whole thing, but Part Six of the series is particularly relevant. It describes how the city government of Houston, and its responsible officials, are flying completely blind as to what is being manufactured and stored in the hundreds of plants in and around the city. From the Chronicle:
A black plume big enough to show up on weather radar touched the sky that Thursday morning in May. Explosions echoed through Spring Branch. Students fled a nearby school. A substance like tar coated cars in the neighborhood. Blood-red fluids spilled into a creek, choking fish and turtles. More than 400 firefighters responded over two days, and when they were done, piles of torched barrels and melted plastic tanks lay in a snow-white blanket of fire-fighting foam. Days later, they still didn't know what they'd been fighting. No city inspector had been inside the place for years, and the owner's records burned up in the blaze. The firefighters didn't even know there was a chemical facility in the neighborhood, one surrounded by houses and apartments, a nursing home and a gun shop full of ammunition…The fire department in the nation's fourth-largest city has no idea where most hazardous chemicals are, forgetting lessons learned in a near-disaster 21 years ago, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.
This is no accident. This is a political philosophy put into action, and a triumphant one at that.
Basic chemistry doesn't give a damn.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57290/texas-deregulation-harvey-chemical-plants/
o, conservative ideas have triumphed in Texas. A business-friendly environment has been created, based on free-market principles, deregulation, and a return to 10th amendment freedoms just as the Founders designed them, because the best government is the one that is closest to the people.
Basic chemistry doesn't care, via NBC News:
A flooded chemical plant near Houston exploded twice early Thursday, sending a plume of smoke into the air and triggering a fire that the firm plans to let "burn itself out." Arkema Group, which is one of the world's largest chemical companies, had warned Wednesday that the plant would catch fire and explode at some point — adding there was nothing that could be done about it.
Awfully blithe for a company whose massive chemical plant just exploded because the company was unprepared for a completely predictable meteorological catastrophe, I'd say. Of course, over the past two days, the Arkema people have given us a master class in Not Giving A Damn. Anyone who saw the essential Matt Dempsey of the Houston Chronicle on the electric teevee machine with Kindly Doc Maddow on Wednesday night knows exactly what I'm talking about. (And, if you're not following him on the electric Twitter machine—@mizzousundevil—you should be.) They played a tape of a conference call on which Dempsey pressed the CEO of Arkema, Rich Rowe, about what substances were in the company's plant that would be released if the plant blew, as it apparently did Thursday morning. Rowe refused to answer, which was his perfect right within Texas' business-friendly environment. They could be hoarding nerve gas in that place, and be perfectly within the law not to tell anybody about it.
AP
In fact, and this is the delectable part of the entire farce, there apparently is a law in Texas that specifically forbids many cities and towns from designing their own fire codes. Hell, the state even passed a law forbidding cities and towns from requiring fire sprinklers in new construction. Freedom!
Two years ago, Dempsey and his team put together a staggering eight-part series about the lack of rudimentary safety precautions that exists in what has become the petrochemical capital of the country. The series took a chunk out of both the recklessness of the Texas state government and out of the spavined state of the EPA and OSHA even under President Obama, the latter problems having gotten worse under the current administration. You should read the whole thing, but Part Six of the series is particularly relevant. It describes how the city government of Houston, and its responsible officials, are flying completely blind as to what is being manufactured and stored in the hundreds of plants in and around the city. From the Chronicle:
A black plume big enough to show up on weather radar touched the sky that Thursday morning in May. Explosions echoed through Spring Branch. Students fled a nearby school. A substance like tar coated cars in the neighborhood. Blood-red fluids spilled into a creek, choking fish and turtles. More than 400 firefighters responded over two days, and when they were done, piles of torched barrels and melted plastic tanks lay in a snow-white blanket of fire-fighting foam. Days later, they still didn't know what they'd been fighting. No city inspector had been inside the place for years, and the owner's records burned up in the blaze. The firefighters didn't even know there was a chemical facility in the neighborhood, one surrounded by houses and apartments, a nursing home and a gun shop full of ammunition…The fire department in the nation's fourth-largest city has no idea where most hazardous chemicals are, forgetting lessons learned in a near-disaster 21 years ago, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.
This is no accident. This is a political philosophy put into action, and a triumphant one at that.
Basic chemistry doesn't give a damn.
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