New hazard in storm zone: Chemical blasts and ‘noxious’ smoke

HOUSTON — A series of explosions at a flood-damaged chemical plant outside Houston on Thursday drew sharp focus on hazards to public health and safety from the city’s vast petrochemical complex as the region begins a painstaking recovery from Hurricane Harvey.

The blasts at the plant, owned by French chemical company Arkema, came after its main electrical system and backups failed, cutting off refrigeration systems that kept volatile chemicals stable.

While nearby residents had been evacuated, 15 public safety officers were treated at a hospital after inhaling smoke from chemical fires that followed the explosions.

The Arkema plant has been identified as one of the most hazardous in the state. Its failure followed releases of contaminants from several other area petrochemical plants and systemic breakdowns of water and sewer systems in Houston and elsewhere in the storm-struck region.

The explosions — more are expected, the company said — will bring fresh scrutiny on whether these plants are adequately regulated and monitored by state and federal safety officials.

The chemical plant accident came as devastation from Harvey, now a tropical depression moving into the Mississippi Valley, continued to spread across the region.

The known death toll from the storm and flooding rose to 39, authorities said.

Record-breaking floods swept through Beaumont, Texas, 160km east of Houston, damaging the water system and leaving the city’s 120,000 residents without clean water.

With the presence of water-borne contaminants a growing concern, the National Weather Service issued flood watches from Arkansas into Ohio on Friday (Sept 1).

Moody’s Analytics estimated the economic cost from Harvey for south-eastern Texas at US$51 billion (S$69.17 billion) to US$75 billion, ranking it among the costliest storms in US history.

Much of the damage has been to Houston, the US energy hub, whose metropolitan area has an economy comparable with Argentina’s.

Some 779,000 Texans have been told to leave their homes and another 980,000 fled voluntarily amid dangers of new flooding from swollen rivers and reservoirs, according to Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Elaine Duke.

Tens of thousands crowded in evacuation centres across the region.

United States President Donald Trump said there is still ``so much to do'' for Texas to recover from the devastating effect of the hurricane. He tweeted Friday that "Texas is heeling (sic) fast thanks to all of the great men & women who have been working so hard. But still so much to do."

While many areas continued to face the threat of rising waters, and rescues from flooded homes were continuing, some Houston residents began to return home for the first time in nearly a week to assess the damage.

Many were shocked at what they found when they returned home.

Ms Anita Williams, 52, was lined up at a shelter at Houston’s George R Brown Convention Centre to register for emergency aid, having surveyed the damage to her one-story home.

“It’s not my house anymore,” Ms Williams said. “My deep freezer was in my living room.

Mr Tom Bossert, the official leading the White House’s response to the disaster, estimated that 100,000 homes in Texas and Louisiana had been damaged or destroyed, and said that President Donald Trump would soon seek billions in aid.

Mr Bossert said that rescuers would provide aid to the estimated 500,000 unauthorised immigrants in the Houston area and that federal officials would not round up those whose only offence was entering the country illegally. But unauthorised immigrants would likely not be eligible for long-term aid, he said, including subsidies to replace damaged housing.

Last week, with the forecast of an approaching hurricane, executives at Arkema decided to shut the plant in Crosby, about 48km north-east of Houston, as a precaution. Most of the 60 workers were sent home; only a “ride-out” crew of 11 stayed behind.

The flooding brought on by the weekend’s torrential rainfall knocked out electrical power to the plant. Backup generators were inundated as well.

The plant produces chemicals that need to be kept cold to avoid becoming unstable and explosive. With refrigeration equipment not functioning, cold-storage warehouses that held the chemicals began to warm.

Fearing that the chemicals might explode, the workers as a last resort transferred them to nine refrigerated trailers on the property. All but one of the refrigeration units on those trailers eventually failed, the company said.

With no way to prevent explosions, the workers abandoned the site late Tuesday.

Company officials said they had been prepared for a major storm, but nothing of the magnitude that hit.

“Certainly we didn’t anticipate having 6 feet of water in our plant,” Mr Richard Rennard, an Arkema executive, said. “And this is really the issue that led to the incident we are experiencing now.”

Professor M Sam Mannan, a chemical engineering expert at Texas A&M University and the author of a study on Texas chemical plants that listed the Arkema plant as one of the most hazardous in the state, said he could understand why company officials did not foresee such extreme flooding.

Still, the dangers of the chemicals they produce should have prompted them to plan for the worst, he said.

“They knew they were dealing with an unstable chemical that they need to keep refrigerated,” he said. “So the question becomes, could they have done something else?”

Arkema was among many chemical companies that fought regulations issued by the Obama administration to tighten safety at facilities nationwide. The rules, which included provisions to require companies to coordinate more closely with emergency responders, were developed after a series of high-profile accidents, including a blast at a fertiliser plant in Texas City, Texas, that killed 15 people in 2013.

But in June the Trump administration delayed enforcement of the regulations until at least early 2019. That followed lobbying against the rules by the chemicals industry, including Arkema, which argued that they were too costly and would jeopardize trade secrets.

Ms Amy Graham, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an email that the original risk management plan remained in effect. “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,” she said.

The organic peroxides made at the Arkema plant, which employs about 60 people, are used as catalysts in plastic manufacturing. The Texas A&M study said that the plant held as much as a half million pounds of one of the chemicals, cumene hydroperoxide.

The explosions occurred about 2am local time Thursday in two of the storage trailers, sending black smoke into the air as the material burned. The company said that with no refrigeration in six other trailers, those would likely explode soon as well.

Mr Rennard, the Arkema executive, said that the smoke produced by the blasts and fires was “noxious” and irritating to the eyes, lungs and possibly skin. Residents nearby the plant remained under an evacuation order.

Mr Rennard said that workers would not enter the site until the floodwaters had receded significantly.

The EPA said that airborne measurements taken at the scene showed no immediate health threats.

“EPA has emergency response personnel on the scene and the agency is currently reviewing data received from an aircraft that surveyed the scene,” Mr Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator, said in a statement. AGENCIES