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- French company warns additional explosions are possible
- County sheriff says there’s no danger to the community
Two explosions and black smoke were reported at 2 a.m. local time, after the plant in Crosby, Texas, lost its electricity supply and backup generators, the company said in a statement on Thursday. Arkema stores organic peroxides at several locations on the site and the threat of additional explosions remains, it said.
“It is not anything we think is a danger to the community at all,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a press conference streamed on the Internet. In a subsequent appearance, he said 13 of 15 deputies had been released from the hospital after receiving treatment for smoke exposure.
Arkema fell 1.9 percent to 91.20 euros at 3:58 p.m. in Paris.
Harvey made landfall on Aug. 26 and has brought torrential rain, knocking out almost a quarter of U.S. refining capacity, of which more than half is in the Gulf of Mexico region. While Harvey’s closing of U.S. crude processing capacity has grabbed headlines and led to spiking gasoline prices, less known is the storm’s outsize impact on chemical production.
“It seems like Harvey came with a plan to follow the chemical industry on the Gulf Coast,” said Sam Mannan, director of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University. “This whole thing is testing how well we have thought through our safety systems and programs and how robust the plants are.”
Uncharted Territory
About 61 percent of U.S. ethylene production has been shut due to Harvey as of Wednesday afternoon, according to PetroChemwire.
While Gulf Coast chemical plants are designed to withstand hurricane force winds and floods, Harvey has put the industry into uncharted territory, according to Mannan.
“I don’t know if anybody is ready for this level of flooding,” he said.
Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua and Tom Keene report on explosions at a Texas plant.
(Source: Bloomberg)
Arkema’s site in Crosby, which is about 25 miles from downtown Houston, is situated in an area with no hospitals, schools, correctional facilities, recreational areas or industrial and commercial areas in the vicinity, according to the Colombes, France-based company.
The best course of action is to let the fire burn itself out, it said. The chemicals made at the plant are used in a variety of products from drugs to construction materials.
“At Crosby, we prepared for what we recognized could be a worst-case scenario,” Rich Rowe, who overseas Arkema’s U.S. operation, said in a statement. “We had redundant contingency plans in place. Right now, we have an unprecedented 6 feet of water at the plant.”
One complicating factor post-Harvey is the urban sprawl gradually engulfing chemical plants, according to Andrea Sella, a professor of inorganic chemistry at UCL university in London.
“Because accidents are unusual, planners can come to underestimate the severity of what are likely to be quite rare events,” he said by email.
— With assistance by Jess Shankleman
