Ron Brackett
With Hurricane Laura approaching the northern Gulf Coast last week, refineries, plastic manufacturers and chemical plants in Louisiana and Texas began shutting down.
As part of their safety procedures, the facilities used a process called flaring to burn off fuel and chemicals that can't remain in the pipes. That burning releases extra pollution into the air.
In Texas alone, facilities released more than 4 million pounds of extra air pollution in the days before Laura arrived, NPR reported. The public broadcaster had the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund analyze the companies' reports to state environmental regulators.
Most of that was from a single release of carbon dioxide from a large methanol production facility in Beaumont, Texas, according to the Houston Chronicle.
(MORE: Hurricane Laura Turns Lives 'Completely Upside Down,' Governor Says)
"Either these facilities shut down ahead of a hurricane and release a ton of pollution or stay on and potentially release even more pollution — or even catch fire," Catherine Fraser, a clean air associate for Environment Texas, an environmental nonprofit, told the Chronicle.
In addition to CO2, the emissions include chemicals like benzene, a known carcinogen, and nitrogen oxides that can worsen respiratory illnesses, according to NPR.
After the storm slammed into the coast early Thursday, a fire broke out at a plant in Westlake, Louisiana, that makes swimming pool chemicals.
A chemical fire burns at a facility during the aftermath of Hurricane Laura, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, near Lake Charles, Louisiana.The fire sent chlorine into the air that was detected by emergency workers’ hand-held monitors, the Associated Press reported. The levels weren't high enough to force an evacuation, but officials did warn residents to stay inside their homes with the windows closed.
The fire was put out Friday and the shelter-in-place order was lifted.
Emissions could be coming from other damaged plants, regulators say, but some air monitors remain offline, the AP reported.
"In a storm of this magnitude, there’s going to be some leaks, there’s going to be some spills," Louisiana environmental spokesman Greg Langley said over the weekend. "We’re still in the process of assessing that. I don’t know of anything personally that’s major."
"I'm hoping that there isn't a repeat of Hurricane Harvey," Juan Declet-Barreto, a geographer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told NPR.
In 2017 after Harvey, flooded petrochemical facilities released enormous amounts of pollution. For days after the storm, public health officials had no reliable air monitor information.
The Environmental Protection Agency inspector general later said state and local authorities failed to adequately monitor air quality during the hurricane and failed to communicate risks effectively with residents.
According to the AP, Texas has made a formal request for air-monitoring help through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The EPA has sent a bus-mounted mobile lab to the Houston area, EPA spokesman James Hewitt said. The EPA also has a monitoring plane over Port Arthur, Texas.
In Louisiana, an environmental consulting firm monitored the air around the site of the chemical plant fire, Langley told the AP.
(WATCH: Atlantic Activity Heats Up Ahead of Hurricane Season Peak)
He also said state flights over the area would look for leaks, sheens, wayward drums and any other signs of industrial threats.
"We have a lot of experience in hurricane response, looking for that," Langley said.
Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality also has mobile air labs, but they have not been deployed since the storm, Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana governor, told the AP.
Strategic Petroleum Site in Louisiana Suffers 'Considerable' Damage in Laura
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve storage site in West Hackberry, Louisiana, “sustained considerable damage” from Hurricane Laura, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday.
Detailed estimates of the damage should be out later this week, Reuters reported.
The West Hackberry site is one of two in Louisiana where the U.S. stores emergency oil reserves in underground salt caverns. The other is in Bayou Choctaw. Two other sites, Bryan Mound and Big Hill, are in Texas.
The Energy Department shut down the Big Hill and West Hackberry sites in advance of Hurricane Laura's arrival. The Big Hill site is back up and fully operational, the department said.
The West Hackberry site is about 25 miles southwest of Lake Charles in Cameron Parish, which was one of the areas hardest hit by Laura. It has 21 storage caverns that can store up to 220.4 million barrels of oil.
Like much of southern Louisiana, the West Hackberry site has lost electricity.
“There is no threat to the integrity of the geologically sealed underground caverns, and no danger of contamination or concern for spills,” an Energy Department official told Reuters.
The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
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