www.chron.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Harvey-reveals-corporate-hubris-regarding-safety-12164662.php
Richard Rennard, the president of Arkema, shrugged his shoulders when asked what more his company could have done to prevent chemicals from burning at his plant in Crosby.
He rattled off the systems his company employed to chill the organic peroxides: Grid power, back-up generators, nitrogen coolers and ultimately refrigerated trailers. On Thursday the refrigerator systems began shutting down and the peroxides began burning and blowing the lids off their containers.
After the disaster at the ****ushima nuclear power plant in Japan, every facility with dangerous materials should know to keep back-up generators above any potential flood line. Yet that precaution escaped Arkema.
Rennard's fatalism in the face of a natural disaster is disingenuous. Experts identified the plant as high-risk, and Arkema could have designed a more resilient facility. But it didn't, most likely because management considered the risk too low and the costs too high.
We know this because the Houston Chronicle identified Arkema as a potentially dangerous plant in an award-winning 2016 investigative series called "Chemical Breakdown." In response to my colleague Matt Dempsey's inquiries about safety, plant manager Wendal Turley assured the newspaper that every precaution had been taken.
"The safety of our workforce and community are paramount in everything we do. We take our commitment to safe operations and compliance with federal and state regulations very seriously," Turley wrote. "We regularly meet with our community and local officials and strive to be a good neighbor at all times."
Arkema executives told their neighbors to flee their homes this week. No one is explaining why Arkema didn't simply dilute the peroxides, which would have ruined them, but at least would have prevented the fires and explosions.
Rennard's refusal to take responsibility for what's happening at his plant is sadly typical. Yet when reporters like Dempsey or neighborhood groups come asking questions, refinery and petrochemical executives become indignant, insisting that outsiders are too ignorant of chemistry and therefore misunderstand the risk.
In public statement after public statement, companies working with hazardous materials or processes in Houston declare that their engineers have anticipated every eventuality, that the public has nothing to fear. Go away, they say, nothing to see here.
Yet since Hurricane Harvey struck, Houston area companies have filed 32 air emission event reports with the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality. The Coast Guard's National Response Center has listed chemical or gas leaks in at least 20 locations in Greater Houston.
Those executives are also shrugging their shoulders, rhetorically asking, "What can you do? Stuff happens."
For example, a pipeline owned by Oklahoma's Williams Cos. leaked anhydrous hydrogen chloride, a corrosive and poisonous gas, in La Porte on Monday. "Williams will review the incident to determine its cause," the company said in a terse statement.
A roof collapse triggered the release of more than 12,000 pounds of potentially toxic chemical compounds at an ExxonMobil facility in Baytown. "This is an unprecedented storm, and we have taken every effort to minimize emissions," Exxon spokeswoman Charlotte Huffaker said.
The National Response Center's log of spills and emissions, by the way, hasn't been updated since Sunday.
Far more polluting than leaks, though, is the shutdown and start-up process at refineries and petrochemical plants. Two million pounds of dangerous chemicals were released in Houston when they shut down between Monday and Wednesday. More has been released since then, and millions more will be released when the plants restart.
Only 5.2 million pounds of emissions were reported in all of 2016. None of these companies are volunteering to reduce emissions by improving their facilities.
Adding to the frustration is the mealy-mouthed language that Rennard and his ilk spew when their companies are forced fess up to their failures.
In Rennard's world, compounds don't burn, they degrade. Chemicals don't explode, they combust. The smoke is noxious, but he won't say if it is toxic.
This may be appropriate in a chemistry class, but a concerned public expects straight talk, which it's not getting.
If we learn nothing else from Harvey, let it be the danger of hubris. Despite claims to the contrary, executives will decide that mitigating a risk costs too much, and subsequent events will prove that they made a horrible mistake.
That's why regulators, journalists and citizen groups have a role to play in demanding accountability and revealing the risks taken. Because when it comes to chemicals, the public shares in the consequences of a bad decision and often pays the highest price.
Let's be honest, Harvey is not causing accidents. The storm is revealing the risks executives willingly took. No one has the right to shrug their shoulders and say, "C'est la vie."
