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Air pollution from industry plagues Houston in Harvey's wake.
Flooding in Houston and utility outages led to belches of fumes from refineries and other industrial sites. Residents of a region already struggling with air pollution wonder: Is it safe to breathe?
On the first sunny day in Houston after about 50 inches of rain, residents in the east Houston community of Manchester emerged from their homes and gave thanks that their neighborhood had been spared in the floods. "Mama, yeah, I just feel blessed," said 73-year-old Maria Julia Rodriguez, standing in her driveway in late August and marveling at her luck. "God was looking out for us, I guess."
And yet, something was wrong. The air was heavy with the smell of gasoline and other harder-to-place odors. The neighborhood is ringed by industrial sites, the biggest of which is the Valero oil refinery, separated by fences from backyards and playgrounds. A lot of people in the neighborhood have lived there for decades, and say they're used to strange smells. Asked about a sickly sweet odor, Rodriguez said "that's how it always is here."
But at least one person was alarmed by what they smelled. They called Houston's 311 hotline to report it, the city health department was alerted and about 24 hours later an air monitor measured a concentration of benzene so high that the CDC recommends workers exposed to that level of the chemical wear breathing protection. Benzene exposure can cause headaches and nausea. Long-term exposure increases the risk of cancer.
The benzene plume in Manchester was one of dozens of unplanned air emissions caused by Harvey's flooding, some during the storm, others occurring for weeks after the rain stopped.
Much of the public health focus in Houston has been on the hazards posed by flood waters, but the city is also facing a crisis in air quality. Even under normal circumstances, "air quality is a big problem in Houston," says Loren Raun, the chief scientist for the Houston Health Department. "We put out more emissions than any other city." At least 7 million pounds of pollutants have been emitted in and around Houston as a result of the storm so far, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund.
A long industrial recovery
And there is more to come. Much of the pollution is the result of refineries shutting down and restarting, which releases petrochemicals into the air. The Environmental Defense Fund warns that about half the refineries in the region still are not operating at full capacity, and as they restart facilities, they'll release more pollution.
Meanwhile, companies are still repairing acute damage from the storm, which caused additional emissions. A Dow Chemical site reported the facility that supplies its steam was hit by lightning during the storm. A chemical storage facility owned by Kinder Morgan reported a 10-day accidental release of 350 pounds of benzene, ethylbenzene, hexane, toluene and xylene, and another 9571 pounds of other volatile organic compounds.
According to the city health department, the benzene in Manchester was caused by a leaking tank at the Valero refinery. Benzene is stored in tanks with so-called floating roofs that sit on top of the liquid chemical and move up and down according to the level of the liquid. They're considered safer, in many ways, than tanks with fixed roofs, because there is no air gap for volatile gasses.
But the floating roofs are susceptible to flooding, because rain water can collect on top. When that happened to a Valero tank during Harvey, about 6.7 pounds of benzene leaked out and rapidly evaporated, according to a filing with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The chain link fences between the tanks and people's homes did little to stop the plume from spreading.
The company has not responded to NPR's inquiries about the status of cleanup or repair operations at the facility.
As of Tuesday, Raun said the concentration of benzene in the air in Manchester had dropped to the point where she was no longer concerned about the immediate health risks. But, she cautioned, the overall air quality problem in the city "is ongoing," with high levels of ozone as well, which can exacerbate respiratory symptoms.
"Those who are working outside, in the process of rebuilding, should be especially vigilant," says Elena Craft, a senior health scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. She says those who are most at risk, such as elderly people or people who already have respiratory diseases, need to be careful breathing outside air.
'Why report it now?'
One of the challenges for Houston officials right now is keeping up with air quality measurements. "We have the largest number of air quality monitors of any city," Raun notes, but many of them didn't operate during the storm, and were inaccessible for a week or more because of flooding. "After the storm, there was nothing, no information. The lab was ok," where they test samples, "but no one could move."
The city's air monitors are all up and running again now, she says, and they're also using a mobile air monitoring unit – a trailer they can park in different neighborhoods to test for volatile organic chemicals, as well as ozone and particulate pollution. The EPA is also using a mobile air monitoring bus in southeast Houston, according to regional EPA spokesperson David Gray. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has not deployed its mobile air monitoring unit to the region.
A TCEQ statement said both agencies had shut down some air monitoring stations to protect them from the storm, and that 96 percent of those in Houston were back online as of Monday, with 100 percent expected by the end of the week. "Of the available air monitoring data collected from Aug. 24 through Sept. 10, all measured concentrations were well below levels of health concern," Gray told Shots in an email. That period includes the time during which high benzene levels were measured in Manchester by independent air monitors.
"We've seen lots of statements [saying things like] 'The air is perfectly fine; we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary with the monitoring units,' " says Craft. "I think that in some cases, they make assessments as to air quality prematurely." Craft's organization has partnered with a company in California that is testing the Houston air for volatile organic compounds including benzene, ethylbenzene toluene and xylene.
Raun says her local health department can use all the help it can get with monitoring the air. "It's a huge area, and we're monitoring as much as we can, but we also rely on people reporting," she says. The agency has been running a public information campaign to encourage people to report strange smells, headaches, burning eyes or other symptoms that could be related to chemical exposure. "In neighborhoods where we're getting less reporting, it could be that there's less [pollution]," she says. "But it could also be that it smells like that every day, so why report it now?"
Juan Parras, the executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, has been doing community organizing in low-income East Houston neighborhoods for more than 15 years. He says monitoring the air and being transparent about what pollutants are present is too little too late for people who are breathing polluted air.
"We have had information about what they've been breathing in for years," Parras says, citing multiple studies showing carcinogens in the air, and elevated rates of cancer and respiratory illness in neighborhoods nestled among chemical plants and refineries.
"These are low-income communities, people of color — no one wants to pay for relocation," he says. Parras doesn't see that changing after Harvey, although he hopes it will. "We've been talking about this problem for 15 years. What makes me believe they'll do something this time?"
"People need to understand, the area is not confined," Parras adds. "The pollution even moves into wealthy communities. They think they're not exposed, but they are."
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Chemical companies have already released 1 million pounds of extra air pollutants, thanks to Harvey.
While attention has been on the Arkema chemical plant, other facilities — oil refineries, chemical plants and shale drilling sites — have been reporting flaring, leaks and chemical discharges.
Oil refineries and chemical plants across the Texas Gulf Coast released more than 1 million pounds of dangerous air pollutants in the week after Harvey struck, according to public regulatory filings aggregated by the Center for Biological Diversity.
While attention has zeroed in on the crisis at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Tex., other facilities — oil refineries, chemical plants and shale drilling sites — have been reporting flaring, leaks and chemical discharges triggered by Harvey.
Emissions have already exceeded permitted levels, after floating rooftops sank on oil storage tanks, chemical storage tanks overflowed with rainwater, and broken valves and shutdown procedures triggered flaring at refineries.
The chemicals released in the week after Harvey made landfall, including benzene, 1,3-butadiene, hexane, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, toluene and xylene.
All seven chemicals are toxic air pollutants documented to harm human health; several cause cancer. Other emissions would bring the total to more than 5 million pounds, the Center for Biological Diversity said.
“Our general concern is the fact that these are relatively unseen environmental threats that don’t normally get recognized,” said Elena Craft, a toxicologist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Further damage and emissions across the region could be uncovered in the coming weeks as floodwaters recede, and chemical safety experts warned that restarting plants could carry as many dangers as the shutdowns.
“We are not out of the woods yet, not the entire industry,” said M. Sam Mannan, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M; University and director of an institute that studies safety procedures in chemical factories.
In addition, winding rivers overflowed and washed over some of the waste pits and drilling pads at shale gas and shale oil drilling sites in the Eagle Ford play in Central Texas, according to satellite imagery collected by Sky Truth, a nonprofit group that monitors the environment. The extent of the damage was not clear.
“It’s unsafe and unacceptable for the petroleum industry to be releasing these massive quantities of air pollutants when storms hit,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director of the Center for Biological Diversity. She added that the companies could do more to limit flaring and leaks. “That shouldn’t be common industry practice,” she said.
Companies have two weeks to submit filings to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality so those figures could increase substantially. But the filings so far give a good picture of some of the problems.
The most common problem in oil refineries has been floating rooftops on storage tanks. Because petroleum is flammable, open space in a tank would collect dangerous vapors. So the oil industry storage tanks have round lid-like rooftops that rise and fall with the level of liquid in the tanks. With heavy rains, many were damaged and sank from the weight, leaving crude oil or petroleum products in the open air emitting fumes. In some cases, they have caused spills too.
Rooftops sank at four tanks at the Pasadena products terminal of Phillips 66. Three sank at the Pasadena terminal of Kinder Morgan, a pipeline company. Two were damaged at Shell’s Deer Park refinery. One each sank at Valero Energy Partners’ Houston terminal, Marathon’s Texas City plant and ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery.
Shell said one leaky tank, discovered during cleanup operations, allowed oil to run out into a surrounding berm. “The leak has been isolated, and we’re in the process of cleaning it up,” said Shell spokeswoman Kimberly Windon, who added that there was “no offsite impact.”
[How to deal with flooded cars in Harvey’s wake]
Flooding has posed other challenges. For a week, BASF, the second largest producer of chemical products in North America, has been struggling to contain rainfall at its Beaumont Agro plant, according to BASF’s filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The plant produces herbicides.
The company started trucking waste water off the site the week before landfall in an attempt to maximize water storage capacity. Then, unable to contain contaminated storm water and process waste water, the company shut down operations on Aug. 27 and brought in temporary water storage capacity. Nonetheless, the tanks overflowed, spilling chemicals into a diked containment area. The containment area then overflowed to the surrounding ground.
Roberto Nelson, BASF’s senior manager for community relations, said a test of leaking waste water on Aug. 29 “indicated there were trace amounts of nonhazardous process chemicals in the discharge water.” He added that the overflow stopped on Aug. 30.
At ExxonMobil’s Beaumont oil refinery, oil flowed over a 10-foot levee and spilled onto a nearby county road, due to the rising Neches River, an ExxonMobil spokeswoman told the local newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise. A different spokeswoman, Suann Guthrie said the company was “closely monitoring” and “taking steps” to contain two sheens.
Oil and chemical companies have also been flaring large amounts of gases, beyond levels ordinarily permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency or TCEQ.
On Sept. 2, the TPC Group said in a TCEQ filing that it was working to control the source of gases being flared at its Port Neches facility. It has already emitted an estimated 1,000 pounds of carbon monoxide and 1,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, well beyond the state’s permitted levels. Nitrogen dioxide is an air pollutant by itself and reacts in the atmosphere to form ozone. It also contributes to breathing problems and acid rain.
Huntsman Petrochemical on Sept. 2 reported it had flared an estimated 1,000 pounds of methyl tert-butyl ether, used as an oxygenate in gasoline and regulated in California. The flaring exceeded the Texas limit of 0.04 pounds an hour for the plant.
Total said in a filing Friday that its petrochemical refinery in Port Arthur had no power and over a 48-hour period had flared half a dozen chemicals, emitting sulfur dioxide in one flare that was 50 times greater than the regulatory limit.
“A facility that shuts down may employ flaring of excess gasses that cannot be processed,” Cal Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, said in a statement Thursday. “Flaring is an approved way to safely relieve pressure during a unit shutdown and is considered an industry ‘best practice.’ These controlled releases are done with the permission of state and federal regulatory authorities.”
Texas is the nation’s largest producer of chemicals, with $129 billion in shipments and 79,000 employees, according to Dooley’s group.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Saturday reassured residents about health concerns. Yet the city of Houston registered up to 15,000 parts per billion of smog-forming volatile organic compounds in and around the Valero refinery in east Houston’s Manchester neighborhood, as well as at other refineries in the region. These concentrations are at least 10 times higher than health officials deem safe, the nonprofit group EDF said in a statement.
The EDF’s Craft said “EPA said inaccurately and inappropriately that residents should not be concerned about the air quality around Houston.” The Houston area was under alert for ground-level ozone, a lung-damaging air pollutant, for the fourth day in a row, according to the EPA’s Air Now Web site.
Mannan, the chemical engineer at Texas A&M;, last year wrote a study ranking Houston-area facilities by their potential to cause harm to the public during a disaster. He said restarting production at dozens of waterlogged plants poses enormous risks for workers and the public.
“Additional events could happen because, if you think about it, a lot of these tanks got submerged in water and a tremendous amount of force is created in 40 feet of water. It can move the tanks around or deform them,” he said.
“Every piece of equipment, every tank, has been battered by the flooding,” Mannan said. “You have to go through and check every piece of equipment. A lot of hard work is still left, and a lot of potential for incidents is still there.”
The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board on Friday issued a “safety alert” urging oil and chemical facilities to take special precautions when restarting after Harvey.
“Restarting a refinery poses a significant safety risk,” said CSB chair Vanessa Allen Sutherland.
Aaron C. Davis contributed to this article.
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