This is the third in a series of blog posts about a chemical
safety incident at an organic peroxides manufacturing facility outside of
Houston, TX. The other posts included:
Well, it looks like the organic peroxide facility incident
is physically over. Over the weekend the decision
was made by the owner and local emergency response officials to burn off
the remaining material rather than wait for decomposition to take its slightly
unpredictable course. There was no loss of life and apparently no major
structural problems at or around the facility as a result of this incident. The
only injuries reported have been the police officers reporting smoke inhalation
problems from the initial fire.
Inventory Reporting
There has been much discussion (see here
for example) in the popular press over the last couple of days about the
company’s failure to share with the public information about the types and quantities
of chemicals stored on the site. Apparently, the company has completed the
appropriate Tier II EPA reporting requirements for the site, but there is no
requirement for the company to make this information public.
On the other hand, C&EN (a publication of the American
Chemical Society, a professional organization for chemists) has
reported that there are at least 225 metric tons of organic peroxides
stored on the site. They also point to the company’s fairly detailed incident
web site that provides a
list of both the products and raw materials stored on site along with a
link to access the Safety Data Sheets for the products. While no industrial
chemical is really considered ‘safe’ for human exposure; there is nothing in
the list of raw materials of special concern.
NOTE: Thanks to Richard Rosera for pointing me at this
article as my subscription to C&EN has lapsed along with my ACS membership.
CSB Investigation
Thursday the Chemical Safety Board announced
that it would be investigating this incident, though it has not yet been added
to the list of current investigations.
The announcement stated that the investigation team would not actually be dispatched
until the site was “deemed safe for entry”. We may see an announcement about
that today.
Commentary
On Thursday, I tweeted
that: “I am actually kind of sad that CSB is deploying for this relatively low
impact incident due to their limited resources. But national news...”. The play
that this relatively minor incident has received in the national press made it
a certainty that the CSB would have to conduct an investigation. I think that
we are going to see in the coming weeks news that there were many more
significant chemical releases during the impact of Harvey on the Texas and
Louisiana coast than this incident.
Having said that, this may be a good stand-in for all of the
chemical incidents that will have taken place as a result of this storm. The
CSB does certainly not have anywhere near the resources to investigate all of
the inevitable incidents, and given the relatively small size of this facility,
the physical investigation should not tie up too many resources. If the CSB
uses this incident to take a detailed look at the type of planning that should
take place in areas like the petrochemical coast of the Gulf of Mexico, then
the investigation will be another valuable contribution to chemical
manufacturing safety.
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